Ivan Oransky

Are lawyers ruining science?

Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that legal issues seem to be popping up more often in the cases we cover. There has been a lawsuit filed against PubPeer commenters, for example, and Nature last month blamed lawyers for delayed and opaque retraction notices.

It was those cases and others that prompted us to write our most recent column for Lab Times with a title mirrored in the headline of this post. As we note in our column, there are a lot of great lawyers out there, some of whom — for example, those at WordPress — have helped us

fight the good fight. We also believe strongly in the ability of prosecutors to punish – and, ideally, deter – scientific misconduct, particularly in cases involving fraud using taxpayer dollars.

Still, as we write: Continue reading Are lawyers ruining science?

Weekend reads: Novartis fires scientist for faking data; journal accepts F-bomb-laden spam paper

The week at Retraction Watch began with a case of a South Korean engineer who had to retract ten studies at once. Here’s what was happening elsewhere, along with an update on a story we covered a few days ago:

Continue reading Weekend reads: Novartis fires scientist for faking data; journal accepts F-bomb-laden spam paper

Journal retracts paper when authors refuse to pay page charges

Taylor & Francis has withdrawn a paper published online after a disagreement with the authors about page charges.

Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Judit Dobránszki, Jean Carlos Cardoso, and Songjun Zeng had submitted the manuscript, “Genetic transformation of Dendrobium,” to GM Crops and Food: Biotechnology in Agriculture and the Food Chain earlier this year. It was accepted on July 29, and posted online on October 30.

Taylor and Francis — who recently took over the journal from Landes Biosciences — had requested $1,000 in page charges, and $340 in color charges. But Teixeira da Silva — who has been made persona non grata by an Elsevier journal following “personal attacks and threats,” and had a paper retracted by a Springer journal after he demanded the editors’ resignations — insisted in an email to the publisher that Continue reading Journal retracts paper when authors refuse to pay page charges

PubPeer Selections: From “this comment is clearly unfounded” to “happy to elaborate,” a range of responses

Late last week, Nature reported some details of PubPeer’s fight against a subpoena from a researcher who claims to have lost a job because of comments on the site. (Background here.) Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: From “this comment is clearly unfounded” to “happy to elaborate,” a range of responses

Engineer in South Korea forced to retract ten papers in one fell swoop

Chang-Suk Han, a member of the engineering faculty at Hoseo University in South Korea, has had ten articles retracted at once because of duplicated data.

Here are the ten studies from Metals and Materials International: Continue reading Engineer in South Korea forced to retract ten papers in one fell swoop

Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound

Raymond Sawaya, director of MD Anderson’s brain tumor program, presents Jun Fu with the 2014 Caroline Ross Endowment Fellowship.

A paper by a former postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center who “admitted to knowingly and intentionally falsifying” a figure has been retracted.

In August, the Office of Research Integrity announced that it had sanctioned Jun Fu for faking data in a study of the results of a mouse study of NVP-HSP990, a Novartis compound designed to fight brain tumors. Here’s the notice for the study in question, published in Cancer Research:
Continue reading Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound

Weekend reads: Speed kills in publishing too; studying blank pages; apologies for the Rosetta Shirt

Highlights at Retraction Watch this week included a case of overly honest referencing and the story of how a medical resident flagged up a pseudoscientific study. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Speed kills in publishing too; studying blank pages; apologies for the Rosetta Shirt

PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

Weekend reads: Scientists behaving badly; sexual harassment at Yale; help us find Retraction Watch bugs

First, a housekeeping note: We migrated web hosts this week, and while the move seems to have gone mostly smoothly, we’ve noticed a few issues: Comments aren’t threaded (even though we have them set up to be), categories aren’t properly nesting, and a small percentage of comments didn’t transfer over with the rest, the way they should have. We’re working on getting this resolved, and looking into whether we can (or should) restore upvoting and downvoting on comments, so please let us know of any other issues you see, and thanks as always for your patience.