Computational Research Integrity - Day 3

Uff. All-day Zoom is tough. We are now on the last day of the Computational Research Integrity Conference 2021.  More exciting talks to come!
[This ended up to be a mess of links, many apologies. But they are good links, so I am focusing more on documenting them instead of summarizing the talks. I probably have some links in twice, sorry about that.]

Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3: 25 March 2021

• First up is Boris Barbour of the PubPeer Foundation, which runs the world's most extensive online journal club. He gave a good overview of the system and some fun statistics about the number of comments. He noted that apparently due to the anonymity of PubPeer (it used to be partial anonymity, the staff knew who was writing, but now it is total anonymity), they have many more comments then PubMed Comments. He quoted Max Planck "Science advances one funeral at a time" [Wikiquote: "Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist." - Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie, Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig, 1948, S. 22] A sister site: Peeriodicals.
  
• Walter Scheirer (University of Notre Dame) "Understanding the Provenance of Visual Disinformation Targeting Science" started off with anit-vaxxers misusing Memes and then took us on a long hunt through the internet to find a surprising source for one of the current stupid memes of bat soup. He then showed how they are trying to find the source of images (of course, using graph theory, the Swiss Army Knife for computer scientists). What a fantastic idea! He published A Pandemic of Bad Science.
• Mario Biagioli (UCLA) "Ignorance or mimicry? Lessons from the merchants of doubt." Mario discussed a sinister development of ethical sounding cover ("transparency", "conflict of interest") for nefarious purposes. I learned a new word: "Agnotology", the organized production and distribution of ignorance. Links:
  NY Times piece by Lisa Friedman about the E.P.A - A book Merchants of doubt talks about this problem in the tobacco industry, global warming, etc. (reviewed 2010 in The Guardian) - Video of testimony to the House Science, Space, and Technology committee "Strengthening Transparency or Silencing Science? The Future of Science in EPA Rulemaking" - Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Doubt -
  Cargo Cult Science - Dorothy Bishop blogged about why she thought serious scientists should NOT attend meetings like this NAS one. -  The Guardian: How the truth gets lost (1 Jan 2020)  - How to tell the difference between merchants of doubt and those who genuinely disagree? Qualifications can be good, but we need more disclosure about who these people are.  People have been coached to look and act like a thoughtful scientist. Mario published a text on Gaming Metrics in 2020.
  
• Thorsten Beck (HEADT Centre - Humboldt University of Berlin) "Image Manipulation Detection — From Visual Inspection to Technology Driven Procedures?"
  HEADT Image Integrity Dataset (but you can't see high-resolution images or download them for legal reasons) - Workshop on data visualization - Synthetic data sets for use in training (Paper) - Ansari & Tyagi (2014): Pixel-Based Image Forgery Detection: A Review - Botched Steve McCurry Print Leads to Photoshop Scandal - Bronx documentation center: Altered images - What is a picture? The temptation of image manipulation (2004).
  
• Yury Kashnitsky (Elsevier) spoke on "How near-duplicate detection improves editors' and authors' publishing experience". It seems to me that Elsevier has re-invented eTBLAST (now HelioBLAST) not just for published papers but for submissions so that they can identify simultaneous submissions and re-submissions. 
  
• Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) "From Cancer to COVID-19, Does Science Self-Correct?" He was invited to review Covid-19 papers (!), apparently on the basis of algorithmic recommendations.  He just recently published an article about Covid-19 retractions and one in 2020 about the Covid-19 science meltdown. MDPI recently invited Jeffrey Beall to guest edit a pharmacy journal - Here's a poster paper Jodi Schneider did with a student for SIGMET about really obvious data quality problems with several databases -  On the topic of self-retraction, [someone] had a few examples here where people had actually boosted their reputation by doing this - people expect it will be terrible, but others are impressed at the integrity it displays- Dorothy Bishop: Fallibility in Science (2018)  - Important list of retracted Covid-19 papers  - Chris Graf "At Wiley we have an escalating scale: Corrections < Notes/notifications (which are new, for when there's community 'interest' but no conclusive finding, yet) < Expression of concern < Retraction (with a notice, linked, watermarked, content retained) < Withdrawal (with a notice, content removed). All have DOIs."
  
• Panel 5: Journalists
  Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch),  Richard Van Noorden (Nature), Stephanie Lee (Buzzfeed News) -  Here is a good Ed Yong Tweet on the relationship between journalists and scientists - Talking of mystery novels, Henry Forman is an academic researcher, now retired, who has a second career as a novelist. One of his books is all about a case of scientific misconduct that turns murderous ... - Two articles by Stephanie: Those Studies About Pasta Being Good For You? Some Are Paid For By Barilla. (2018) - An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March (2020). Collaboration between Zotero and Retraction Watch (2019).
  
• Panel 6: Investigators / Whistleblowers
  Paul Brookes (Panel chair) University of Rochester, Elisabeth Bik, Boris Barbour, Erica Boxheimer (EMBO Press), Jana Christopher (FEBS Press; Image-Integrity). There was a very lively discussion in the chat about the purpose of retractions, the length of time they take (if anything happens), and how allegations are proven. The links were flying fast, so here's what I managed to grab and the tabs I still had open at the end of the conference: Referee3 - COPE flowchart on image manipulation - A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth. (2018, from a story told by Ivan) - Challenges in irreproducible research (2018) - Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions (2021) - Appreciating data: warts, wrinkles and all (2006) - What is Recklessness in Scientific Research?: The Frank Sauer Case (2017) - Hidden Data: The Blind Eye of Science (book by Helene Z. Hill) -
  I was sued for libel under an unjust law (2012) - Courts refuse scientists' bids to prevent retractions (2015) - Survival bias (2019) - Scientists Make Mistakes. I Made a Big One (2020) - Innovations in scholarly communication (Bianca Kramer's tool overview site) - Embassy of science.
  
  
• Daniel Acuna then chaired a 56 person brainstorming session about what voices are missing from the discussion. And it worked! Susan Garfinkel noted that the institutions (RIOs) and their processes for research misconduct investigations are missing. Other voices: Information exchange between reviewers. In biomedical research: patients! Non-journal publishers. Money!!! Physicians and professional organizations (impact on treatments). Federal regulations. Insights from the fakers - The Mind of a Con Man (2013) - Faking science A True Story of Academic Fraud Diederik Stapel Translated by Nicholas J. L. Brown (2014). Legal barriers to sharing of sensitive information between stakeholders. A sense that some of these tools are being used for scientists, to help them avoid errors. What if the institution is not responding? Cultural influences (gift authorship being regarded as positive). International perspective. Different types of misconduct in the various scientific areas. Clearer COPE guidelines for corrections/retractions/expressions of concern. COPE representative. Usability testing between tool developers and users. Someone from MOST (Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology)
  
• CRICONF attendees may be interested to attend the WCRI2021 digital event webinars from 30 May – 2 June 2021. Free registration and more information is available at https://wcri2022.org/digital-event-2021/.
  
  Over and out, I need some sleep!