This was a week of stem cell retractions, fake peer reviews, legal threats, and we announced that we’ve been awarded a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:Continue reading Weekend reads: Authorship for sale, STAP stem cell scandal finally over?
Faked peer reviews — a subject about which we’ve been writing more and more recently — are concerning enough to a number of publishers that they’ve approached the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to work together on a solution.
In the past, we have reported on a number of cases in which authors were able to submit their own peer reviews, using fake email addresses for recommended reviewers. But what seems to be happening now is that companies are offering manuscript preparation services that go as far as submitting fake peer reviews. And that, no surprise, worries publishers.
Here’s COPE’s statement out today: Continue reading Are companies selling fake peer reviews to help papers get published?
Jens Christian Schwamborn, a stem cell researcher at the University of Luxembourg, is retracting a 2007 paper on how to grow brain cells.
The paper, “Ubiquitination of the GTPase Rap1B by the ubiquitin ligase Smurf2 is required for the establishment of neuronal polarity,” was published while Schwamborn was at Westfälische Wilhelms‐Universität Münster in Germany. An anonymous critic had sent questions about the study to Germany’s DFG in the middle of last year, and later to Paul Brookes, who posted them on PubMed Commons.
Those criticisms match the problems listed in the detailed notice: Continue reading Stem cell researcher retracts neuron paper for “image aberrations”
Piero Anversa, a stem cell researcher at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a colleague, Annarosa Leri, have sued Harvard over an investigation into their work that they claim has cost them millions in a forfeited sale of their company, and job offers.
The team has had a paper in Circulation retracted, and a paper in The Lancet subject to an expression of concern.
In the suit, first reported by the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Globe, Anversa and Leri blame a co-author for the issues in the papers, and claim that their Continue reading Stem cell researchers sue Harvard, claiming faulty investigation lost them job offers
The Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education has published a special issue on scientific ethics, and it includes an invited piece from us.
In “What Studies of Retractions Tell Us,” we decided to do a literature review of the small but growing field of retraction studies. Five years ago, this would have been a very short paper, consisting of a handful of references, but we were able to find about 30 studies to include quite easily.
Here’s the abstract: Continue reading What do studies of retractions tell us?
Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share.
After more than four years, 2,000 posts, and incredible responses from the scientific community, we are thrilled to announce that The Center For Scientific Integrity, a not-for-profit corporation we’ve established, has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to expand the work of Retraction Watch.
The goal of the grant — $200,000 per year for two years — is to create a comprehensive and freely available database of retractions, something that doesn’t now exist, as we and others have noted. That, we wrote in our proposal, is
a gap that deprives scholarly publishing of a critical mechanism for self-correction.
While we’re able to cover somewhere around two-thirds of new retractions as they appear, we’ll need more resources to be comprehensive. Here’s more from our proposal: Continue reading Retraction Watch is growing, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation
The stories behind several recent inscrutable retraction notices became a bit more clear today when the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued findings in cases involving former researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Francisco.
The ORI found that H. Rosie Xing, a former assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Continue reading ORI sanctions former University of Chicago and UCSF scientists for faking findings
On Sunday, tune in to WUSA at 8:30 a.m. Eastern in Washington, DC, or online starting at 9 to see Ivan on BioCenturyTV. (He might just have an exciting announcement to make.) Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Maggie Simpson publishes a paper, why correcting the scientific record is hard
This week, PubPeer filed a motion to quash a subpoena demanding that they reveal the names of some of their commenters. Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: Spinal injury, theoretical physics, and inherited fear
Bruce Murdoch, a neuroscientist formerly of the University of Queensland, will appear in court next week to face fraud charges stemming from an investigation that has already led to three retractions, several corrections, and similar charges for one of his colleagues.
Here’s the notice from the Crime and Corruption Commission: Continue reading Second former University of Queensland researcher to appear in court to face fraud charges