Weekend reads: ‘Race science’ under review; researcher blames critiques on anti-LGBTQ discrimination; the politics of the politics of smell

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Former Harvard researcher, now at Moderna, loses paper following postdoc’s report
• Dean in Bulgaria accused of plagiarism
• 19 months and counting: Former Hindawi journal still hasn’t marked paper
• Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?
• Exclusive: Researcher who received settlement to leave University of Iowa won’t be starting new job

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “Publisher reviews national IQ research by British ‘race scientist.'”
• “Columbia, Penn State cancer researchers face retractions, one blames LGBTQ discrimination.”
• “Her Thesis on the ‘Politics of Smell’ Stirred the Online Masses. Here’s What She Thinks About It.”
• “NEJM Editor-in-Chief Eric Rubin told The BMJ that ‘for older manuscripts, correction is not necessarily appropriate unless there would be an effect on clinical practice.'”
• “Robust debate and discussion are crucial ingredients in the advancement of science, but should always be conducted with respect and civility.”
• “Accessibility worsens for blind and low-vision readers of academic PDFs.”
• “No one really knows how many scientific publications are published each year or how many journals exist.”
• “NIH launches ‘science of science’ pilot programme.”
• Researchers present “WithdrarXiv,” a dataset containing over 14,000 retracted papers.
• “How Bad Is Fraud in Alzheimer’s Research?”: a Q&A.
• “Retraction handling by potential predatory journals.”
• Researchers look at “Trends in Retraction of Orthopaedic Research Articles.”
• “Industry blanks Arab universities’ ‘sausage machine’ research.”
• “Unanswered questions in research assessment”: “Can global reform efforts be diverse and aligned?”, “Can we apply the scientific method to research assessment?” and “Whose values lead value-led approaches?”
• “Three years in, MIT’s OpenAg whistleblower lawsuit mired in delays.”
• “This fearless science sleuth risked her career to expose publication fraud” — and created our Hijacked Journal Checker.
• “Enhancing the trustworthiness of pain research: A call to action.”
• “Free-riding in academic co-authorship: The marginalization of research students.”
• “A Paper Mill Target Reflects”: a view “from the front lines of the fight for publishing integrity.”
• Researchers look into the “phenomenon of scientists monopolizing authorship in academic journals.”
• “Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars.”
• “Latin America is a leader in nonprofit open-access journals. But it struggles to give them global visibility.”
• ‘The “state of predatory publishing, 15 years since the term was first coined.”
• “The rise of predatory publishing.”
• “Felonies” and “misdemeanours” in research: author discusses their adverse effects. 
• 19 months and counting: Former Hindawi journal still hasn’t marked paper flagged by sleuths.
• “Incorrect pK_a values have slipped into chemical databases and could distort drug design.”
• South Africa’s National Research Foundation “‘looking deeper’ at inequalities in research.”
• “Bad bar charts distort data — and pervade biology.”
• “Extracting treasure from trash: The corpus of scientific literature needs a drastic clean-up.”
• “‘Getting paid to review is justice’: journal pays peer reviewers in cryptocurrency.”

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• weekend-reads