Weekend reads: French agency’s research director sanctioned; AI data woes at MIT; is disruptive science over?

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive. When we asked them about it, they removed it.
• Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so.
• Correction finally issued seven years after authors promise fix ‘as soon as possible.’
• Researchers to pull duplicate submission after reviewer concerns and Retraction Watch inquiry.
• Genentech authors flip PNAS study from corrected to retracted following Retraction Watch coverage.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 59,000 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):

• “CNRS chemist punished for scientific fraud.” A link to our previous coverage.
• “It should be completely normal to ask, ‘so how did you actually get this amazing data anyway?'”, says Stuart Buck, who first spotted problems with MIT’s AI paper. 
• And: “What the failure of a superstar student reveals about economics.”
• “Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?”
• “Gaming the Metrics? Bibliometric Anomalies and the Integrity Crisis in Global University Rankings.”
• How “Clarivate is clamping down on bad actors in academic publishing.” A link to our coverage of the impact factor change. 
• Publisher to include new indicator of retracted citations using GetFTR, which relies on the Retraction Watch Database.
• When researchers secretly used AI bots on Reddit, “it became a landmark moment for research ethics.” Links to our previous coverage.
• “How the publishing elite weaponise vocabulary,” from the EIC of a journal “often lumped into the ‘predatory’ pile.”
• “A Sting Inside a Papermill.”
• “Russia honors chemist who was suspended in Spain.”
• “The Black Market of Publications in Peru: Paper Mills and Authorship for Sale.”
• “The value of co-authorship must be recognised outside the sciences.”
• An AI research quiz: “find out how your ethics compare.”
• “Conspiracy theories have unraveled scientific authority. Is the scientific community to blame?”
• The University of Minnesota “loses $2 million federal grant after allegations of fabricated data.” And: University “antiracism health center struggled even before plagiarism allegations.”
• Researchers find non-financial conflicts of interest are “meaningful conceptual entities” that require “new approaches” for management.
• “The interests of scholarly communication and publishing are not always compatible.”
• “Why I stopped submitting my work to for-profit publishers.”
• “Open Science: An Antidote to Anti-Science.”
• School responds after retracted paper (one of over 1,500 at same journal) listed high school students as authors.
• “Why restrictive academic authorship practices perpetuate inequality.”
• Researchers emphasize need to “focus” on clinical trial integrity since they contribute “directly to healthcare practice and policy recommendations.”
• “Musician Evelyn Harris returns honorary degree to Smith College after plagiarized speech.”
• “The Integrity of Randomized Clinical Trials: Consensus Statements from Hong Kong to Cairo.”
• “AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers.”
• “You won’t find these on the shelf. Newspapers print an AI-generated reading list with fake books.”

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