Ivan Oransky

PubPeer Selections: “Meta-rant” about Science paper; posting raw data satisfies critics; was gel splicing ever OK?

Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections:

Continue reading PubPeer Selections: “Meta-rant” about Science paper; posting raw data satisfies critics; was gel splicing ever OK?

What should an ideal retraction notice look like? We (and COPE) want your input

Last week, we announced a new partnership with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) “to improve access to information about retraction policies.” The first step, we and PRE said, was that Retraction Watch would create guidelines for retraction notices, to which PRE’s flagship product, PRE-val, would link.

Well, it turns out that great minds think alike, or along similar lines, anyway. Today we learned that next week, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) will be discussing a standard retraction form proposed by friend of Retraction Watch Hervé Maisonneuve, who has published several papers on retractions. According to a writeup: Continue reading What should an ideal retraction notice look like? We (and COPE) want your input

Hayabusa Science retraction made official, but behind a paywall

Science has published the retraction of a 2006 paper about an asteroid, following a report in its news pages that the study’s authors had requested the move.

Here’s the paywalled — tsk, tsk — notice: Continue reading Hayabusa Science retraction made official, but behind a paywall

Scientist in Ireland notches two mysterious retractions and a correction

Sinead Miggin, a biologist at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, has withdrawn two papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) and has corrected another paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Here’s the opaque JBC notice for “14-3-3ϵ and 14-3-3σ inhibit Toll-like receptor (TLR)-mediated proinflammatory cytokine induction,” a paper first published in November 2012: Continue reading Scientist in Ireland notches two mysterious retractions and a correction

Weekend reads: A scientific impostor, Retraction Watch comments lead to retractions

Here at Retraction Watch, the week featured the revelations of the peer reviews of an early version of the STAP stem cell paper, and an announcement about a new partnership. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: A scientific impostor, Retraction Watch comments lead to retractions

A new partner for Retraction Watch: PRE (Peer Review Evaluation)

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) to improve access to information about retraction policies.

In the coming months, we’ll be publishing guidelines for what we think should be included in retraction notices, and on how those notices should be publicized. As a release describing the new partnership notes: Continue reading A new partner for Retraction Watch: PRE (Peer Review Evaluation)

“Potentially groundbreaking,” “highly provocative:” Nature STAP stem cell peer reviews published

A day after we published the cover letter and peer review reports about the STAP stem cell paper rejected by Science, Science‘s news section has published the same material for the version rejected by Nature.

From Science‘s news story about the document: Continue reading “Potentially groundbreaking,” “highly provocative:” Nature STAP stem cell peer reviews published

“Truly extraordinary,” “simply not credible,” “suspiciously sharp:” A STAP stem cell peer review report revealed

Retraction Watch readers are of course familiar with the STAP stem cell saga, which was punctuated by tragedy last month when one of the authors of the two now-retracted papers in Nature committed suicide.

In June, Science‘s news section reported:

Sources in the scientific community confirm that early versions of the STAP work were rejected by Science, Cell, and Nature.

Parts of those reviews reviews have surfaced, notably in a RIKEN report. Science‘s news section reported:

For the Cell submission, there were concerns about methodology and the lack of supporting evidence for the extraordinary claims, says [stem cell scientist Hans] Schöler, who reviewed the paper and, as is standard practice at Cell, saw the comments of other reviewers for the journal. At Science, according to the 8 May RIKEN investigative committee’s report, one reviewer spotted the problem with lanes being improperly spliced into gel images. “This figure has been reconstructed,” the RIKEN report quotes from the feedback provided by a Science reviewer. The committee writes that the “lane 3” mentioned by the Science reviewer is probably the lane 3 shown in Figure 1i in the Nature article. The investigative committee report says [co-author Haruko] Obokata told the committee that she did not carefully consider the comments of the Science reviewer.

The entire reports, however, have not been made available. Retraction Watch has obtained the full text of the editor’s cover letter and reviews of the rejected Science paper. The reviews are full of significant questions and doubts about the work, as would be expected in a rejection. We present them here, to fill in some of the gaps and help readers consider how the research eventually made it through peer review: Continue reading “Truly extraordinary,” “simply not credible,” “suspiciously sharp:” A STAP stem cell peer review report revealed