Last week, we reported on an uniformative retraction notice in Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE), an Oxford University Press (OUP) title, that the publisher wanted $32 to read. To OUP’s credit, they quickly acknowledged that the retraction hadn’t been handled properly.
Earlier this week, OUP’s senior publisher for journals Cathy Kennedy followed up with some welcome news: Continue reading Oxford University Press clarifies policy: All retraction notices will be open access
We can only imagine how Joe Hollyfield felt to learn from us, of all people, that his journal, Experimental Eye Research, had retracted two manuscripts in a recent issue.
The papers, “Mechanisms of retinal ganglion cell injury and defense in glaucoma,” by Qu J, Wang D, and Grosskreutz CL, and “Mitochondria: Their role in ganglion cell death and survival in primary open angle glaucoma,” by Osborne, NN, carried the same retraction notices:
This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.
Because in our experience such unhelpful wording often masks interesting details — read, author misconduct — we called Hollyfield for comment. He graciously walked us through the retractions, explaining the case in detail, until we realized that we were talking about different papers entirely. Hollyfield, it turned out, thought we were asking about the travails of Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, an eye researcher from India whom we’d previously covered and whose work recently had been retracted by Experimental Eye Research and other journals for image manipulation.
But Hollyfield was unaware of the two retractions we’d intended to talk about with him and told us he’d look into them.
Here’s what he learned: Continue reading Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices
Sometime last year, the University of Zurich’s Erik Postma was reading a paper in Science titled “Additive Genetic Breeding Values Correlate with the Load of Partially Deleterious Mutations” when he realized something.
The authors, led by Joseph Tomkins of the University of Western Australia, had made a mistake.
Postma set to writing a “Technical Comment,” the way that Science usually deals with criticism of a paper’s methods. He sent his first draft to the Tomkins group: Continue reading Science genetics paper retracted after “unfortunate mistake”
A Montreal Heart Institute researcher who retracted two papers less than a month ago has been fired from his post.
Zhiguo Wang, who had been funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the Canadian Diabetes Association, studied the genes linked to heart rhythm abnormalities, among other subjects. Wang also has an appointment at the University of Montreal.
As first reported in Retraction Watch, Wang withdrew two papers for the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) in the journal’s August 12 issue. The story was quickly picked up by Postmedia and the CBC. At the time, Wang told us: Continue reading Montreal Heart Institute researcher dismissed following two retractions for image manipulation
The editor of a journal that published a highly contentious article challenging claims of global warming has stepped down over the paper.
In a remarkable letter to his readership, Wolfgang Wagner, who until today was editor of Remote Sensing, an open-access journal that we’ve written about before, said he felt forced to resign because the review process at his journal — which, by implication, he shepherds — failed the scientific community (link added): Continue reading Editor of Remote Sensing resigns over controversial climate paper; co-author stands by it
On Tuesday, we reported on the case of a retraction notice in Molecular Biology and Evolution, an Oxford University Press (OUP) journal, that had three problems: Continue reading Remember the $32 opaque retraction notice? Molecular Biology and Evolution removes paywall
Yesterday, we reported on a retraction in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology involving plagiarism and author issues. Well, it turns out we only had half the story.
Thanks to a comment on Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, which picked up our item yesterday, we’ve learned of a remarkable pair of letters in the journal about the paper. (We missed the letters because we didn’t originally see the “This article has been cited by other articles” section of the notice page, and the people involved, who might have made reference to it, haven’t returned our requests for comment.) At the core of the matter is whether — as the authors of one letter strenuously argue — the publication owes its readers the same kind of apology it served up to the scientist whose work was plagiarized in the offending article. The answer they received is an equally vehement no.
We think the exchange is noteworthy enough that we’re posting it below. Before we do, though, we’ll state that journals and editors frequently apologize to their readership in retractions, so that’s not really what’s at stake here. Rather, what the debate drives at is, in a sense, whether journal reviewers have a sort of fiduciary responsibility to the scientific community.
We also need to correct the record. In our original post, we surmised that we knew who the plagiarizing author was (although we did not name that person). Turns out, as letters below indicate, our hunch was off base.
Now to the letters: Continue reading Should journals apologize to victims of plagiarism? More on Journal of Clinical Microbiology case
Have you heard the story about the young, Orthodox Jewish fellow who decides to stop keeping kosher, so he goes to the local coffee shop and orders a cheeseburger with ham and bacon and a glass of milk?
Some retraction notices put us in mind of that tale (true, by the way). Consider the following one from the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, in regard to a 2010 paper by Spanish scientists titled “Nationwide Sentinel Surveillance of Bloodstream Candida Infections in 40 Tertiary Care Hospitals in Spain”: Continue reading Authorship questions: Retracted infection paper from Spain broke all (well, most) of the rules
A completely unhelpful retraction notice appears in the September issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution for “Investigating the Role of Natural Selection on Coding Sequence Evolution in Salmonids Through NGS Data Mining,” a paper first published in March.
Here’s the entire notice for the paper — which has been removed completely from the journal’s site, we should mention: Continue reading Author of retracted Molecular Biology and Evolution paper explains opaque notice that’ll still cost you $32
In December, we reported on how a Swedish company that was about to go public dealt with a retraction of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that formed some of the basis of their work. The company, Wnt Research, was scheduled to go public on November 26, 2010, but after the retraction appeared on November 11, they postponed the initial public offering (IPO), and let every investor that had expressed an interest know about the retraction.
We thought the company’s moves demonstrated a remarkable transparency. Now we learn that the scientist responsible for the errors that led to the retraction has given back the shares which he or she was given when the company was founded. The company announced the news in a press release last week: Continue reading The $240,000 retraction: Scientist responsible gives back company shares