TITLE: Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud; 37 studies affected
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-researchers-accused-of-scientific-fraud-37-studies-affected/
EXCERPT: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.
The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture.
DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is "committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," and that "every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully."
The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson.
The Wall Street Journal noted that Rollins, the integrity officer, is also a co-author on two of the studies. He told the outlet he is recused from decisions involving those studies.
Amid the institute's internal review, Rollins said the institute identified 38 studies in which DFCI researchers are primarily responsible for potential manipulation. The institute is seeking retraction of six studies and is contacting scientific publishers to correct 31 others, totaling 37 studies. The one remaining study of the 38 is still being reviewed.
Of the remaining 19 studies identified by David, three were cleared of manipulation allegations, and 16 were determined to have had the data in question collected at labs outside of DFCI. Those studies are still under investigation, Rollins told The Harvard Crimson. "Where possible, the heads of all of the other laboratories have been contacted and we will work with them to see that they correct the literature as warranted,” Rollins wrote in a statement.
Despite finding false data and manipulated images, Rollins pressed that it doesn't necessarily mean that scientific misconduct occurred, and the institute has not yet made such a determination. The "presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author's intent to deceive," Rollins wrote. "That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct."
The very simple methods used to manipulate the DFCI data are remarkably common among falsified scientific studies, however. Data sleuths have gotten better and better at spotting such lazy manipulations, including copied-and-pasted duplicates that are sometimes rotated and adjusted for size, brightness, and contrast. As Ars recently reported, all journals from the publisher Science now use an AI-powered tool to spot just this kind of image recycling because it is so common.
TITLE: Science’s fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper mills
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00159-9
EXCERPT: A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle one of the thorniest problems in scientific integrity: paper mills, businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. In a statement released on 19 January, the group outlines how it will address the problem through measures such as closely studying paper mills, including their regional and topic specialties, and improving author-verification methods.
“There’ve been too many empty words. This is intended to actually deliver,” says Deborah Kahn, an elected council member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a non-profit organization in Eastleigh, UK, and co-chair of the steering group of United2Act, which produced the consensus statement.
“Paper milling isn’t an operation, it isn’t an organization: it’s a culture,” says data scientist Adam Day, who founded Clear Skies in London, which has developed a detection tool called The Papermill Alarm. Paper mills have been creating a problem for a long time, he says. “And it’s been ignored for a long time.”
Estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of paper-mill publications are polluting the scientific literature. Paper mills often sell authorships on bogus papers to researchers trying to pad their CVs. One analysis indicates that some 2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 resembled paper-mill productions. Detecting these articles is difficult — although there are growing technological efforts to spot them — and shutting down the operations that produce them is even harder. Researchers are also concerned that the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools will exacerbate the problem by providing more ways to quickly generate fake papers that can dodge current detection methods.
TITLE: Just Bribe Everyone - It's Only the Scientific Record
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/just-bribe-everyone-it-s-only-scientific-record
EXCERPT: When we last visited the lively, ever-evolving world of shady scientific publishing, we saw publication brokers offering journal editors kickbacks to push their papers into print, and here's plenty more about it in a new article here at Science. I particularly enjoy the parts where some of these sleazeballs wake up to the fact that they are not talking to customers, but rather to a reporter, and suddenly their entire demeanour changes.
Those customers are both on the author side and the editorial side. You too can be a co-author if you just pony up, and if you're an editor, well, you can earn extra cash by slotting these papers into the journal. An especially good route to that has been the "Special Issue" racket, where a group of themed papers are rounded up by a guest editor. People have caught on over the years that being one of these guest editors, especially in an open-access journal where money has to change hands, is a quick way to make spending money. And the paper mills have meshed right into the process - it's like Philip Larkin's poem where he imagines his money admonishing him: "I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques" These folks are willing to write them, and everyone walks away satisfied, right?
Well, I'm sure not. No one should be. The scientific literature, for all its weirdness and all its faults, is a hard-won record of decades, centuries of honest work and investigation. It is the essential ingredient to further progress, because that's what science is - building on what we've found out so far. It is one of the great works of the human race, and watching cynical losers shoveling steaming manure into it for cash makes me want to go kick someone. I mean, scientific progress would be plenty hard enough already if every paper were perfectly conducted and written lucidly and completely. We're a long way from that, but the paper mills (and the "editors" who take their money) are making the whole situation pointlessly worse.
You know the sorts of journals where this stuff shows up. It's why Wiley had their Hindawi publishing arm suspend all special-issue publishing for months while they got a look at how bad the problem was. You can tell that they've grasped the extent of it, because they announced last month that they're ditching that entire name - and I'll bet that they're regretting the bright idea of buying Hindawi in the first place, although you won't get anyone to say that on the record. But "sunsetting the brand", as they're putting it, will do little unless they sunset the sleaze, too. Which will take more work, and I hope that Wiley isn't planning to skip that part. And don't get the idea that it's just Hindawi - how could it be? MDPI journals are mixed up in this, De Gruyter, IMR, AIMS Press and many others as well. Any publisher where people are willing to look the other way.
It's to the point where every journal publisher and every editor will tell you, if they're being honest, that they have been and are continually being offered bribes. I would be very suspicious if someone tried to act shocked at the question, as if they'd never heard of such a thing. This is the state of scientific publishing in the 2020s, and we have to realize it. What we don't have to do is accept it.