Category: RW announcements

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?

2014 was quite a year for Retraction Watch. We reported on hundreds of retractions — here are our top 10 — but we also took some big steps in our development. Some highlights: Continue reading Retraction Watch: A year in review, an accounting, and thanks

As they did last year, our friends at The Scientist asked us to contribute our list of top 10 retractions in 2014. Here’s our list, from Anversa to Zaman. Continue reading The top 10 retractions of 2014

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