Saturday, July 21, 2018

Predatory journals face intense scrutiny


In a great example of collaborative journalism, The Indian Express partners with several other big names in the news business to shine a bright and harsh spotlight on predatory journals. Its global partners include broadcasters NDR and WDR (Germany), and newspapers Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Le Monde (France), and the magazine The New Yorker (USA); IE says International Consortium of Investigative Journalists provided the platform for the over 60 journalists to share their findings.

There is just way too much that has been brought to light, so I will just provide a link to the stories [Update: Links to the entire series of news stories in The Indian Express are collected at this page]:

Friday, July 20, 2018

Links


  1. FY Fluid Dynamics on Dead salmon swimming.
  2. Editorial in Nature: China sets a strong example on how to address scientific fraud. "New measures introduce what could be the world’s strongest disincentive for misconduct so far."
  3. David D. Perlmutter in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academic Job Hunts From Hell: Keep on Script. "The job interview is not a spontaneous exchange, it’s a minefield."
  4. Debraj Ray and Arthur Robson in Vox EU: Certified random co-authors. "This column -- whose authors both have surnames starting with R, one of whom was once recommended a “wonderful paper” on which he was a co-author -- proposes a new mechanism for co-authorship. It involves a coin toss to order co-authors, and an institutionally ratified symbol to signal random order. Such a mechanism would be fairer and more efficient, and it would displace alphabetical order through voluntary participation alone."
  5. Leonie Mueck in Nature Nanotechnology: Report the awful truth!. "Negative and null results are routinely produced across all scientific disciplines, but rarely get reported. The key to combat the biases arising from this mismatch lies in disseminating all details about a work." rather than just positive results."