‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’ Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

"On the heels of a high-profile retraction that followed deep investigations by the Science news team, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the journal, says it’s time to improve the process of correcting the scientific record.

In an editorial published today, Thorp, a former university provost, describes the often time-consuming and frustrating process involving journals, universities, and government agencies that are often at odds, or at least have different priorities. Based on the experience of what can feel like gridlock, he calls for breaking the process into two stages:

• The first stage should evaluate the validity of the paper without attributing blame. The university would then feel free to determine the validity of the paper before it plunges into a lengthy and more complicated investigation of the underlying wrongdoing.
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• If the paper is not valid, it can then be retracted much more quickly. The second stage, with journals out of the picture, would be for the university to determine whether there was fraud that rises to the level of research misconduct. This plan would accelerate correction of the scientific record.

More at link: https://retractionwatch.com/2022/08...chief-wants-to-change-the-retraction-process/

 

The potential of such a solution depends on the university having peers who would genuinely provide opposition to a bad papers, which given its often a consistent bend on the world I find it hard to believe such opposition would remain in a university for long, it would quickly be untenable for peers to be working at such odds. But also surely the bigger problem is that people who clearly have a history of not understanding the scientific method are still published by journals at all. Your first retraction point should be the moment you get put into a naughty bin for fundamental review on subsequent papers and if you fail on basic method again they just blacklist them. It also all feels like a patch job to the fundamental problem of publish or die combined with only publishing positive results and science thus ending up with a lot of fraudulent papers as a result. Unless replication is consider valuable and negative results are considered valuable the fundamental issues will remain and just putting an extra review it wont change the fundamentals especially when its done by a colleague within the same institution or its reviewed by someone without the appropriate expertise. If a none expert can spot its not a valid finding you have a bigger problem.

 

Although this proposal does not solve the issues with scientific publishing in general, it seems to be a good move. If universities are no longer able to (essentially) stop retractions from happening by dragging the process on forever, they will be incentivised to minimise the tarnishing of their reputation when an article is retracted. This should translate to quicker investigations, tougher sanctions and, hopefully, the implementation of practices to stop research misconduct or fraud in its tracks.

It will be interesting to see whether scientific publishers follow suit. This gives them more power over their journals, so I assume they are not uninterested.