The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), a state-level agency in Brazil that funds scientific research, is suing Paty Karoll Picardi, a protégé of Brazilian diabetes researcher Mario Saad.
According to a São Paulo Court of Justice website, the reason stated is for “recebimento of bolsa de estudos,“ which translates to “receipt of scholarship.” FAPESP is suing for 334,116 Brazilian Reals ($102,927).
After the editorial board of a public health journal resigned in protest last week, the publisher is trying to “move on.”
In a statement from Taylor & Francis, the publisher laments that the board of theInternational Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health“did not wish to take the opportunities offered by ourselves and the editor-in-chief to discuss the journal’s future,” and defended its recent editorial decisions that were questioned by the board.
Since the the spring, the board has vocally protested actions taken by thejournalwithout consulting the editorial board, including its decision to appoint a new editor with industry ties, and the “unilateral withdraw[al]” of a paper by the previous editor that was critical of corporate-sponsored research, with little explanation. In the resignation letter from last week, the board said it did not wish to participate in the “apparent new direction that the journal appears to be moving towards.”
In its statement, the publisher says it has no plans to make “major changes” to the journal:
Alexander Neumeister. Source: Yale School of Medicine
A researcher specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder is facing jail time for allegedly embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of federal grant money.
Yesterday, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced criminal charges against Alexander Neumeister, alleging he used the grant funds on trips and meals for family and friends. As the New York Times reported last year, Neumeister was dismissed from his position at New York University (NYU); NYU shut down eight of his studies following an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which found evidence of lax oversight, falsified records, and inaccurate case histories.
The U.S. Attorney has also filed a civil lawsuit against Neumeister under the False Claims Act, also for misuse of grant funding. The complaint does not specify the total amount of funds he allegedly misused.
In a statement, Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim said Neumeister:
Researchers have retracted a 2017 paper exploring a novel approach to treat kidney injury, because three images were “constructed inappropriately.”
That’s about as much as we know: The retraction notice provides few details about the nature of the issue, only that the authors—most of whom work at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey—could not provide the original data for the recently published figures.
Retraction Watch: You note that this newly retracted article was co-authored by the graduate student Wansink initially blogged about, but wasn’t as heavily scrutinized as the four papers about pizza consumption she also co-authored. Why do you think this paper wasn’t as closely examined?
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After more than 30 years working with scholarly journals, Irene Hames has some thoughts on how to improve peer review. She even wrote a book about it. As the first recipient of the Publons Sentinel Award, Hames spoke to us about the most pressing issues she believes are facing the peer review system — and what should be done about them.
Irene Hames: I don’t think that saying something is ‘peer reviewed’ can any longer be considered a badge of quality or rigour. The quality of peer review varies enormously, ranging from excellent through poor/inadequate to non-existent. But if reviewers’ reports were routinely published alongside articles – ideally with the authors’ responses and editorial decision correspondence – this would provide not only information on the standards of peer review and editorial handling, but also insight into why the decision to publish has been made, the strengths and weaknesses of the work, whether readers should bear reservations in mind, and so on. As I’ve said before, I can’t understand why this can’t become the norm. I haven’t heard any reasons why it shouldn’t, and I’d love the Retraction Watch audience to make suggestions in the comments here. I’m not advocating that the reviewers’ names should appear – I think that’s a decision that should be left to journals and their communities.
A former postdoc at Emory and Georgetown Universities falsified data in manuscripts and a grant application to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.