WAME Newsletter #73, February 17, 2020

In this issue: 
 
 
Rewarding academic faculty: be careful what you incentivize
How can better outcomes be encouraged -- in publications 
and in research
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Providing the links does not imply WAME's endorsement. Bold added for emphasis. Please send any suggestions for content or format to [email protected]. See also WAME Newsletter Compilation for content from earlier newsletters.
 
 
 
Vietnam universities incentivized lecturers [faculty] to publish in international journals by paying them, but some lecturers began naming higher-bidding universities as their affiliation to maximize the payout: "being a full-time lecturer at one university but receiving money from another was a form of fraud."
 
"[R]esearchers saw institutional reward structures (e.g. evaluations, contractual commitments) as strongly focused on scientific excellence (“I am primarily paid for publishing…”). Thus, they saw reward structures as competing with—rather than incentivising—broader notions of societal responsibility."
 
 
 
How should subscription journals handle access to research on outbreaks?
United Kingdom Research and Innovation [which includes the seven Research Councils, Research England and Innovate UK] is "reviewing its open access policies for peer-reviewed research articles and academic books that result from research supported by UKRI."
 
Do universities need to use a competitive bidding process to determine where their researchers will pay to publish?
 
"The OA Switchboard initiative is a collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers" to handle eligibility enquiries about whether a journal's open access meets funder or institutional requirements, and to ensure that a financial settlement can be arranged.
 
 
The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) drops its paywall
 
"Starting in 2020, all accepted manuscripts will have community abstracts published alongside the traditional publication. It is hoped that this new feature will encourage patients and community members to better understand the work that is published in JAMIA Open. It is also expected that this will force us all to reflect on the real-world impact of our work."
 
 
 
Should journals use the CASRAI Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) to define authorship roles?
 
How to decide who's on first? "This post introduces some of the guidelines and criteria that authors and journals can refer to when deciding who earned a place on the author list."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"Views of North American journal editors from an interview‐based study...While none of our participants supported the use of large amounts of recycled material from one journal article to another, some editors were staunchly against any use of recycled material, while others were accepting of the practice in certain circumstances. Issues of originality, the challenges of rewriting text, the varied circulation of texts, and abiding by copyright law were prominent themes as editors discussed their approaches to [text recycling]." [hat tip to Frances E. Likis]
 
When artificial intelligence writes papers, who will own the copyright?
 
 
 
 
"Tuesday was International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To mark the occasion, I took the opportunity to speak with a few of the 1,600+ female early-career researchers who participated in the most recent AuthorAID online course in research writing in the sciences."
"Gender gap in research...Women published fewer articles...were more often affiliated with institutions in the Western world...were more likely to publish qualitative studies (versus systematic reviews or experiments...and to publish in primary healthcare journals."
 
"[T]he odds of authoring an invited commentary were 21% lower for women compared with men who had similar fields of expertise and publication metrics among researchers who had been actively publishing for the median of 19 years.
 
"[W]e show that this overcitation of men and undercitation of women is driven largely by the citation practices of men, and is increasing with time despite greater diversity in the academy." [preprint]
 
 
 
 
"Mexico’s scientific ascent constitutes a remarkable achievement by countless talented and dedicated scientists, guided by policies focused on quantitative metrics of science: publication counts, citation counts, and journal impact factor. But this success also serves as a cautionary tale. By codifying standard notions of scientific quality in its national science policies, Mexico also steered research away from nationally-relevant topics and placed systematic barriers between Mexican scientists and potential users of science in that country."
 
"A new ranking system for academic journals measuring their commitment to research transparency will be launched next month – providing what many believe will be a useful alternative to journal impact scores." Journals will be assessed on "10 measures related to transparency, with their overall result for each category published in a publicly available league table."
 
"[I]f TrendMD is recommending papers based on community clicks, it is recommending papers published in more popular, frequently-read, wide-distribution journals. Put another way, TrendMD is biased toward recommending papers from prestigious journals."
 
 
 
"While a number of tools and services have been created to help non-native English authors (all major publishers offer some form of editing service, for example), there has been little if any attention paid to the challenges of being an L2 speaker — for example, in terms of participating in conferences and other professional events, whether as a speaker or a listener."
 
 
 
"Errors still need to be corrected and bad science weeded out. But am I really acting 'for the science' if I dutifully undermine the 'excellence', 'novelty' and 'impact' of a peer’s ideas and results, knowing full well that these metrics are rather disconnected from the true values of good science: creativity, reproducibility and integrity?"
 
"Most respondents believe co-reviewing to be a beneficial (95%) and ethical (73%) form of training in peer review. About half of the respondents have ghostwritten a peer review report, despite 81% responding that ghostwriting is unethical and 82% agreeing that identifying co-reviewers to the journal is valuable. Peer review would benefit from changes in both journal policies and lab practices that encourage mentored co-review and discourage ghostwriting."
 
 
A preprint that underwent pre-peer review via Review Commons has been posted. See the (anonymous) reviews at the right-hand tab. Interestingly the authors indicate how they'll respond to the reviewers' comments without actually revising the manuscript.
 
 
 
 
 
Clone journals -- how to avoid being swooped
"Clone journal web pages are a counterfeit mirror of an authentic journal that exploit the title and ISSN of legitimate journals... Although publishers pay their registration charges for web domain services on a regular basis, any failure to do so could allow a waiting cyber intruder to swoop in and steal a domain for their own purposes and, at the same time, divert the entire web traffic towards the clone journal website."
 
"A large number of poor-quality journals were included in the UGC approved list, which opened the floodgates for desperate authors"--now replaced with UGC-CARE (University Grants Commission Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics). Beware that a few fake websites have mimicked UGC-CARE.
 
 
Editor beware: the former Beall's list is now at https://beallslist.net/, while someone remaining anonymous is updating Beall's list at https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/ without providing criteria or transparency for its decisions. The @fake_journals Twitter account, also anonymous, may or may not be affiliated with either site.
 
Preprint "Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a modified Delphi consensus process" now published
 
 
 
The nonprofit Center for Open Science hosts preprint servers around the world but recently had to start charging fees; now the popular Indonesian preprint server INA-Rxiv will be closing and several more may follow
 
 
 
 
"What business are we in? Are we defining our business by our current product? Or do we focus on a core mission/business and create products and services to support that? Is our internal culture wedded to our current products? If so, how can we shift that culture?"
 
"cOAlition S aims to help make the nature and prices of OA publishing services more transparent, and to enable conversations and comparisons that will build confidence amongst customers that prices are fair and reasonable." Final report available here
 
"Many authors are using (or should we say abusing?) the peer review system over and over again without paying for any of the associated costs. For now, most of these costs are paid by subscribers, but in an OA world, the costs would be covered by authors who do successfully publish in a given journal. This arrangement penalizes authors who careful choose where to submit their work while benefitting those who employ a more scattershot approach." Or should authors be given the option to pay both fees vs just an APC?
 
Consider the Association of American Publishers' letter to the US President and European proposals, but what about China?
 
 
A sales manager says, "More interdepartmental interaction means more understanding of each others’ contribution to the success of the company. This leads to a greater awareness of how different departments can help each other succeed."
 
 
What is a “transformative agreement”? Two explanations:
  • ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges), organized by Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with the German Research Foundation (DFG), PLOS and Co-Action Publishing
 
 
 
"The bipartisan report [by two members of (the US) Congress] accused the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma of working, through its international arm Mundipharma, to expand the indications for chronic opioid use and minimise concerns about risks of addiction"..."The WHO did the right thing in retracting these documents, and they now have an incredibly important opportunity to set the record straight by ensuring that future guidelines are evidence-based and not corrupted by the commercial interests of opioid manufacturers or third party organizations who they support."
 
 
"How publication integrity was compromised is secondary to whether the paper is reliable. Unreliable data or conclusions are problems irrespective of the cause... Here we present a tool — the REAPPRAISED checklist — that aims to help readers, journal editors and anyone else assess whether a paper has flaws that call its integrity into question."
 
"[C]ompared with the control laboratories, treatment laboratory members perceived improvements in the quality of discourse on research ethics within their laboratories as well as enhanced awareness of the relevance and reasons for that discourse for their work as measured in surveys administered 4 mo after the intervention."
 
"Towards a Research Integrity Culture at Universities" from the League of European Research Universities (LERU)
"The paper first examines how universities can tackle the issues of ‘sloppy science’ or ‘questionable research practices’ by improving research design, conduct and reporting, then identifies how researchers could be educated about research integrity. It then gives ideas on the internal structures that could be put in place to deal with research integrity and incidents of research misconduct. It highlights the benefits of transparency and accountability at universities, and what universities can do to instil a culture of research integrity within their institutions."
 
"Research institutions have the duty to empower their research staff to steer away from [questionable research practices] and to explain how they realize that in a Research Integrity Promotion Plan. Avoiding perverse incentives in assessing researchers for career advancement is an important element in that plan."
 
"Alleged cases of research misconduct are usually looked into by committees of scientists usually from the same institution or university of the suspected offender in a process that often lacks transparency...A global operationalization of research misconduct with clear boundaries and clear criteria would be helpful. There is room for improvement in reaching global clarity on what research misconduct is, how allegations should be handled, and which sanctions are appropriate."
 
"[I]t is important for both government and institutional leaders to know that academic integrity largely comes through hiring academics and scientists who will have close contact with their research rather than those with multiple roles or too many administrative positions to be responsible institutional leaders or principal investigators."
 
 
What's the difference between simple, identical duplications vs duplication of parts within the same panel or another panel?
 
"You don’t need a degree in statistics to catch most of these errors – common sense and simple arithmetic are often all that’s required.”
 
"An academic Arabic corpus for plagiarism detection: design, construction and experimentation"
 
"By 2018, two formal investigations had concluded that Latchman’s research group had published nine scientific papers that contained falsified data... That Stephanou’s work was flagged back in 2006 adds to the frustration felt by many UCL scientists, who are already upset that the long-running probe into widespread fraud in Latchman’s labs ultimately led to no disciplinary sanctions."
 
 
 
"The influence of academic recognition is highlighted in the Sorbonne declaration on research data rights, recently signed by the Go8, Russell Group, League of European Research Universities and six other research-intensive university networks...The new pact asks governments and funders to develop consistent policies to support the sharing and reuse of research data and to prevent commercial platforms from 'locking in' data on their own servers, as well as asking for additional financial support for data management."
 
"Here, we reflect on some of the lessons learnt for researchers sharing vast amounts of genomic data... An international code of conduct could help investigators to overcome some of the current hurdles, as well as others that might arise as legislation on data protection evolves."
 
"Across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject that interests you...Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is."
 
"Biomedical journal editors generally believed that engaging trained professionals would be the most effective, yet resource intensive, editorial intervention. Also, they thought that peer reviewers should not be asked to check [research guidelines]. Future evaluations of interventions can take into account the barriers, facilitators, and incentives described in this survey."
 
"Science examined more than 4700 trials whose results should have been posted on the NIH website ClinicalTrials.gov under the 2017 rule. Reporting rates by most large pharmaceutical companies and some universities have improved sharply, but performance by many other trial sponsors—including, ironically, NIH itself—was lackluster...of 184 sponsor organizations with at least five trials due as of 25 September 2019, 30 companies, universities, or medical centers never met a single deadline."
 
"From these data, we have built the Rigor and Transparency Index, which is the average score for analyzed papers in a particular journal. Our analyses show that the average score over all journals has increased since 1997, but remains below five, indicating that less than half of the rigor and reproducibility criteria are routinely addressed by authors." Authors' commentary
 
"A German research institute is offering scientists a €1,000 (£847) bonus if they publish null results or a replication study as part of its bid to reshape academic incentives."
 
"Over half of the articles we examined were publicly available (154/237, 65% [95% confidence interval, 59% to 71%]). However, sharing of important research resources such as materials (26/183, 14% [10% to 19%]), study protocols (0/188, 0% [0% to 1%]), raw data (4/188, 2% [1% to 4%]), and analysis scripts(1/188, 1% [0% to 1%]) was rare...
 
 
 
"Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS)...Last summer, the commission asked 541 journals to retract a total of 2528 papers."
 
 
"[J]ust about every clinician will have received some statistical training...the largest limitation of this training is that it often neglects to let the student know just how incomplete it is."
 
 
 
 
Sustainable Science Symposium: April 15, 2020 [travel budget optional
"Join us in a day of radical and uncompromising thought about the sustainability of science in all its shapes and forms."
 
 
 
 
The following articles require a subscription or pay per view fee:
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Sources include Retraction Watch, Healthcare Information for All listserve, Open Scholarship Initiative listserve, Open Science Newsletter, and Scholarly Kitchen.
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Margaret Winker, MD
Trustee, WAME
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