Weekend reads: Investigations need sunlight; should we name fraudster names?; how to kill predatory journals

The week at Retraction Watch featured a lawsuit threat following criticism of a popular education program, and the new editor of PLOS ONE’s explanation of why submissions are down. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Universities are worse than foxes guarding chicken coops when it comes to policing their own researchers. Our co-founders propose a solution in Slate.
• S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is asking why the U.S. National Science Foundation policies, doesn’t name researchers who commit misconduct, the way the Office of Research Integrity does. (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
• 13 ways to distinguish predatory journals from legitimate titles: A new study in BMC Medicine. “If they are cut off from receiving manuscripts,” two of the authors write in an accompanying blog post, “they will cease to exist.”
• With respect to Clare Francis in particular,” Peggy Mason writes of the pseudonymous whistleblower, “I would say that their/her/his hit rate…was sizable enough to take very seriously.” (The Brain Is So Cool blog)
• The Independent Journal Review retracts a story speculating on a link between former U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent Hawaii visit and a judge’s ruling on a travel ban by the new administration. The incident seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for one reporter. (Sydney Smith, iMediaEthics)
• “Wansink says that, at first, he was going to share the data with them even though it meant jumping through some hoops because of rules regarding subject anonymity. But once he realized what they were doing, he changed his mind.” Food researcher Brian Wansink, whose work is under severe scrutiny, speaks to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tom Bartlett.
• The long-running fight between The Lancet and The BMJ over a paper on statins offers plenty of lessons on how to resolve scientific disputes, says BMJ editor Fiona Godlee, writing in The Lancet.
• Should honest mistakes by postdocs and grad students doom their careers? Publish or perish: It’s eating science’s young, whether they’re committing misconduct or honest errors, say our co-founders in STAT.
• Ever try the “long and painful process” of publishing a challenge to a previous paper’s results? Robert Calin-Jageman, who finally published a paper critical of one claiming analytical thinking reduced religious belief, has. (Lenny Teytelman) As it turns out, religious belief and analytical thinking may not be as antithetical as they seem. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, New York Magazine)
• “[W]e must tie journals’ reputations to their practices regarding transparency,” says Simine Vazire, who adds: “The public expects transparency from science, and appropriately so – we should be held to a higher standard than used car salespeople.” (Collabra: Psychology)
• The International Institute of Engineers and Researchers is hosting a $400, one-day conference in Ottawa, but they won’t say where in the city it’s being held or who the keynote speaker is. They also seem to have plagiarized their ethics policy. (Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen)
• “The predatory meetings/conferences are especially surreal, heinous affairs that have Calls for Papers, will accept your abstract, and demand a substantial registration and proceedings publication fee.” Tseen Khoo offers three danger-signs of these meetings. (The Research Whisperer blog)
• A new paper examines whether registered randomized controlled trials were less likely to report positive findings than ones that were not registered. (The BMJ)
• “On the occasion of International Women’s Day, March 8, three Indian science publications have produced editions with an all-women authorship for the month,” reports Vasudevan Mukunth. (The Wire)
• What are ethics of citation? asks Neuroskeptic. (Discover)
• Who better to figure out how to incentivize replications than an economist? (Douglas Campbell) (via Replication Network)
• “Beall’s focus was very much on where not to publish. The recent events suggest that a change in direction is needed.” Introducing the Urology Green List. (Henry Woo, BJU International)
• “Use of p-values may lead to paradoxical and spurious decision-making regarding the use of new medications,” say John Ioannidis and a colleague. (PLOS ONE). But Daniel Lakens argues that it’s not that simple. (The 20% Statistician blog)
• Did you know that Cell was a 2006 horror novel by Stepen King? Roger W. Byard writes about “the forensic implications of predatory publishing.” (Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology)
• “Such flaws are unacceptable in published research; they cannot be defended or explained away.” An open letter calling for the retraction of the controversial PACE study of chronic fatigue syndrome. (Virology Blog)
• Want to improve research misconduct policies? Look to social psychology research, say Barbara Redman and Arthur Caplan. (EMBO Reports)
• A Turkish researcher unveiled a new diagnostic test — but a group of US researchers claims she spirited away their work, and they have published papers to back it up. (Andrew Joseph, STAT)
• Federal U.S. investigators continue to look into a case of alleged misconduct at Duke, Ray Gronberg reports. (Durham Herald-Sun) See our earlier coverage here.
• The U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) “vaguely worded policy [for responsible conduct of research courses], and lack of accountability, has not produced meaningful educational experiences for most of the undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral trainees funded by the NSF,” says a new paper. (Science and Engineering Ethics)
• Teach the responsible conduct of research in the research environment, say Dena Plemmons and Michael Kalichman, not just in courses. (Science and Engineering Ethics, sub req’d)
• “The designated director of the Vienna State Opera has been accused of taking parts of his university dissertation from another writer, whom he failed to acknowledge.” (Slipped Disc)
• “As things currently stand, most academic fields rely on a one-dimensional credit model where the academic paper is the dominant factor,” writes Arfon Smith. “Incentives to publish other parts of the research cycle, such as software and data, do exist but they don’t currently exist at the individual researcher level.” (Physics World)
• “How can we tackle the thorny problem of fraudulent research?” asks Mike Marinetto. (The Guardian)
• “We believe that access to information is a universal human right, and journal articles available through the library are very expensive,” write Memo Cordova and Amber Sherman. (The Blue Review)
• A site in Japan has shut down after a panel found that more than 20,000 articles appearing there were plagiarized. (Mainichi Japan)
• A fourth researcher at India’s Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research has been charged with plagiarism. (Tanbir Dhaliwal, The Hindustan Times)
• “Google Scholar is a serious alternative to Web of Science,” argues Anne-Wil Harzing. (LSE Impact Blog)
• All Nature-Springer journals “are now committed to becoming formal signatories to the Transparency Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines,” which “focus on transparency and openness in research design, data and materials to enable reproducible research.” (Nature)
• A collection of articles in the Scientific Data journal “highlight the many ways that scientific replications can be conducted, and they reveal the benefits and challenges of crucial replication research.”
• “Fortune favors the well read,” writes Julian West, explaining why he scans such a large number of journals. (Science)

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