Have you ever met a top scientist who is also an active journal editor? After years of patent litigation this question keeps coming up when seeking for technical help. The answer is: only seldom, since great minds usually have little interest in getting distracted. The consequences of this inverted selection are immediately apparent: deep […]
To make progress, science requires peer review. But the type of peer review that has assisted scientific research for centuries is a far cry from the self-appointed data police organization named Retraction Watch (RW). With its complete lack of accountability and nonexistent scientific credentials, RW only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired […]
The reproducibility crisis, especially in the soft sciences, is by no means the only crisis affecting publication of scientific research. As we and others have emphasized, an even greater danger originated with the self-appointed fraud police with its tactics of coercion, bullying and shaming arising with the advent of violent organizations like Retraction Watch. The […]
Science requires peer critiques, cannot do without them. But as we have amply shown, Retraction Watch (RW) only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and former APS president, “the self-appointed data police is volunteering critiques of such personal ferocity and relentlessness that they […]
We love science, we also know that getting and keeping our scientific work published in a good venue can be an arduous task. This is true now more than ever due to a lack of leadership in the scientific establishment and to the advent in 2010 of a new player in the game: the angry […]
Contributed by Dr. Ariel Fernandez Stigliano Virtually everybody recognizes that science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Whenever a result elicits attention, be it because it is published in a high-impact journal, or better still because it is important, there is a high likelihood that others will attempt to reproduce it. They often fail, disturbingly often. […]
Not long ago Science Editor Marcia McNutt published an appalling editorial entitled “Due process in the twitter age“, where she claimed that social media created an anxiety and added a sense of urgency to the post-publication peer review (PPPR) of reported scientific research. In a post at Science Transparency, we swiftly retorted that if the […]
On 26 June 2015, Science magazine published an article in its section “Policy Forum” entitled “Promoting an Open Research Culture” (B. A. Nosek et al. Science, Vol. 348, pp. 1422-1425, DOI: 10.1126/science.aab2374). The article and two related pieces (“Self-correction in science at work”, and “Solving reproducibility“) published in the same issue seem to have been inspired by the perception that there […]
_______________________________________ Public!, take note: There is fake science! And who will handle the crisis? Scientists’s peers let’s hope, or we slide into hysteria. ________________________________________ RELATED READING Nature June 2, 2015 editorial Misplaced Faith: The public trusts scientists much more than scientists think. But should it? New York Times June 1, 2015 editorial Scientists who cheat.
According to a recent investigation, surgeon Paolo Macchiarini from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has allegedly committed scientific misconduct in his reporting of results from patient transplants of synthetic tracheas seeded with stem cells. The misconduct investigation 39-page report drafted by Bengt Gerdin, a professor at Uppsala University, reveals that in six published papers, author Paolo Macchiarini had deliberately and knowingly misrepresented […]