By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Schneider Shorts 1.10.2021 – with antivaxxers big and small, Brazilian killers, Dutch research integrity, Russian science kakistocracy, the wonders of peer review, how COVID-19 miracle cures work, and a Twitter scandal of academic fraud which was too good to be true.
In 2019, MDPI published a Special Issue “Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability”, one year later its owner Shu-Kun Lin expressed admiration for Trump and said “Black Lives Matter. White Lives Matter. All Lives Matter.”
Oncotarget, the somewhat controversial OA journal, switched from pretend-soliciting my services to threatening to sue me for defamation. Their lawyer writes my disrespect caused them financial damage.
The emails published here prove that EU Special Envoy for OA, Robert Jan Smits, received constant counselling from Frontiers CEO Kamila Markram when designing Plan S. It seems, Frontiers and Smits share exactly same vision for the future of scholarly publishing.
Lynn Kamerlin, Bas de Bruin and their colleagues have been the most vocal critics of Plan S from the very beginning, braving continuous opposition from certain OA leaders. Now that final Plan S guidelines were released, the chemists publish this Open Letter expressing their worry about a possible dystopian OA future.
A former Karolinska researcher is subject of research misconduct investigation, for forwarding to university OA publishing bills for her past research there. To save €3k, no trick is too dirty for Karolinska Institutet.
Bremen rector Bernd Scholz-Reiter previously explained his predatory publishing and self-plagiarism as a personal crusade for Open Access. Now a closed access conference paper he coauthored was declared by his university as definitely not plagiarised.
The following is a rant in praise of preprints. I blog of usefulness of preprints, open science and open access, how BioRxiv works and their Plan U.
Plan S, designed by the former EU Commissioner Robert-Jan Smits, became a complete and chaotic mess where everyone, including the members of the signatory cOAlition S of research founders, does whatever they want. I learned all that while participating at the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) conference in Berlin, on 15-16 January.
Frontiers is a somewhat unconventional open access publisher, which likes to have it both ways: playing scientific elite while accepting almost anything from paying customers. My regular contributor Smut Clyde will tell you below how some anti-vaccine scare-mongers managed to sneak in some rather dangerous works thanks to Frontiers’ unofficial “we don’t judge, we just charge” quasi-policy.
