Category: RW announcements

Have you seen our “unhelpful retraction notices” category, a motley collection of vague, misleading, and even information-free entries? We’d like to make it obsolete, and we need our readers’ help.

Here’s what we mean: Next month, Ivan will be traveling to Rio to take part in the World Conference on Research Integrity. One of his presentations is a set of proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their dissemination that we hope will inform publishing practices and severely limit the number of entries in our “unhelpful retraction notices” category. In September, for example, we announced that our guidelines would be linked from PRE-val, which “verifies for the end user that content has gone through the peer review process and provides information that is vital to assessing the quality of that process.”

Here’s a draft of our proposed guidelines, which include many of the items recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Continue reading What should an ideal retraction notice look like?

Dear Retraction Watch readers: In recent months, since we switched to Google AdSense, we’ve heard from a number of you that you find some of the ads on our site annoying. Here’s a secret: Continue reading Don’t like annoying ads on Retraction Watch? Here’s how to keep them turned off

Since becoming our intern in June of last year, and then our first-ever staff writer in October, Cat Ferguson has written more than 200 posts, breaking news left and right. But as we noted on Twitter the other day with not a small degree of sadness, Cat has left Retraction Watch for a great gig at BuzzFeed.

That means we’re hiring.

The job is definitely fast-paced. Continue reading Retraction Watch is hiring!

In late 2013, we filed suit along with Automattic, the parent company of our blogging platform WordPress, against someone allegedly at a news service in India who falsely claimed that we had violated its copyright. Last week, we were pleased to learn Automattic won a similar case against a group that tried to censor another blogger.

Both suits were designed to draw attention to people who misuse the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as an excuse to censor information they don’t like. Last summer, we withdrew our suit, because the defendant had “neither served an answer nor a motion for summary judgment, and indeed has not appeared,” according to our dismissal filing. But by then the issue had made its way to Capitol Hill, where Automattic general counsel Paul Sieminski used our case as an example of DMCA abuse in testimony last March.

While we of course would have liked to have continued pursuing the case against Narendra Chatwal at the so-called News Bullet in Utter Pradesh, we were very pleased to hear last week that Automattic had prevailed in a second, similar case they filed at the same time as ours. In this case, blogger Oliver Hotham was targeted by a group championing the rights of heterosexuals after he posted excerpts from a press release the group sent him along with some commentary; in response, “Straight Pride UK” invoked the DMCA to force Hotham to take down the post. As Ars Technica reported: Continue reading WordPress parent company wins suit fighting false DMCA copyright claims

In January, we were accused of bullying.

We were writing about a researcher who had 16 papers retracted for fake peer reviews; when we found out he was trying to find a new job in academia, we posted a follow-up that linked to his CV. Some commenters called the post “bullying,” “unethical,” and “over the line.” Not everyone agreed, but the back-and-forth prompted us to think about when such follow-ups were appropriate, and whether scientists who’ve committed fraud deserve a second chance. Continue reading Do fraudsters deserve a second chance?

Retraction Watch readers, please join us in welcoming Alison McCook to the fold.

We’re thrilled that McCook, an award-winning Philadelphia-based science writer and editor, began as editor today. Continue reading Meet the new Retraction Watch editor: Alison McCook

We’re pleased to share this guest post from Leonid Schneider, a cell biologist, science journalist and a prolific cartoonist whose work graces our Twitter profile and Facebook page. In it, Schneider argues for a new way to ensure accountability for publicly funded research.

It has become clear that scientific dishonesty is rarely sanctioned.  In the worst case scenario, manipulated or fraudulent papers have to be retracted, yet scientists of a certain academic standing can weather retractions without much adverse effect on their careers or institutional budgets. Retraction Watch lists plenty of cases in which the full blame for retracted papers has been accepted by the first author, with the senior principal investigator (PI) continuing as nothing has happened. Cases of justice, like that of the HIV-vaccine fraudster Dong-Pyou Han, who has apparently accepted a plea bargain after losing his job at Iowa State University, which in turn had to forfeit part of a $14.5 million NIH grant to the lab in which he worked, are very rare.

The problem is that Continue reading What if universities had to agree to refund grants whenever there was a retraction?