![peerreview[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/peerreview1.jpg?quality=83)
Science publishing giant Springer, with over 2900 journals, has announced on its website that 64 articles published in 10 of its journals are being retracted. Editorial staff found evidence of fake email addresses for peer reviewers.
No word yet on what type of papers, or if any climate papers are involved.
From press release:
Retraction of articles from Springer journals
London | Heidelberg, 18 August 2015
Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.
The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research, and we take our responsibilities as its guardians seriously. We are now reviewing our editorial processes across Springer to guard against this kind of manipulation of the peer review process in future.
In all of this, our primary concern is for the research community. A research paper is the result of funding investment, institutional commitment and months of work by the authors, and publishing outputs affect careers, funding applications and institutional reputations.
We have been in contact with the corresponding authors and institutions concerned, and will continue to work with them.
source: http://www.springer.com/gb/about-springer/media/statements/retraction-of-articles-from-springer-journals/735218
h/t to Leif Svalgaard
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That’s good. Open access is better though in general.
“or if any climate papers are involved.”
Why? Are any Soon or Pielke papers involved?
Nope.
“Nope”
Phew! I am relieved!
I think you’ll find that the reviews were all favorable, and the email addresses supplied by the authors.
So it is all transparent? Climate science (including Soon, Pielke and McKittrick) has nothing to worry about? Relieved again!
Funny you should not mention all the guys we KNOW fraudulently abused the peer review system, based on their ClimateGate messages.
Speaking of email and fraud brings to mind Peter Gleick. If any alarmist papers are involved I am sure the authors will be acclaimed and rewarded for their, um, ingenuity.
Have you a degree in boorishness?
Multiple doctorates from all appearances
You mean the Pal Review system is broken? Not surprised at all.
It pays to have pals. That way you can publish garbage honestly.
Poor guys had to game the pal review system with fake emails.
They should host a few cook outs and they could be legends!
PayPal?
Don’t trust PayPal
Regards
Climate Heretic
Actually, you don’t even need Pals – just a few email addresses and you can write the paper and review it all by your self.
Odd, I was thinking of a recent announcement regarding logging in and using legitimate skeptic names backed by false identification.
That was just what I was thinking. As far as I can see the academics in Climate are all eco-activists with a few notable exceptions. These are the same guys who gang up and go onto wikipedia to deny access to anything sceptical, and it seems pretty logical that they just took their normal behaviour for peer review onto wikipedia.
The deck has always been, and still is.,completely skewed in climate and because most of them have very poor standards, they continue to allow politicised garbage to be printed whilst denying good scientific work because it is rightly sceptical.
“The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research”
I would argue that the peer-review process has worked against reproducibility in research. Peer-review has replaced reproducibility as the standard of good research. Having your research pass a peer review is what gives researchers the moral license to say things like this.
“Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
Your example is pal review or a refusal for peer review..
Traditional peer review was completely open and, in my experience, amounted to a “debate” (at least an open conversation) with one’s peers. That seems to be an unbridgeable area in much climatology. Perhaps that is because some work in this field is science that could be reproducible, but much of it is fabricated philosophy and psychology or politics that amounts to no more than opinion and has some purpose other than illuminating truths.
Cheers
“…no more than opinion and has some purpose other than illuminating truths.”
Corrected:
“…no more than promoting one’s own ideology and has some purpose other than illuminating truths.”
=)
Problem is, what does the climate “science” produce that is reproducible? Computer models? Just what experiments do they run that would need to be validated? They seem to do nothing but collect data to show CO2 drives temperatures. Can you reproduce an ice core? tree ring? “Hockeystick?” Ooops, guess you can’t reproduce their Hockeystick.
The fallacies are ever endless and ever growing…
The pause is the discrepancy between what they predicted and what actually happened. In other words, it is really the first time that any of their garbage could be subject to real test and it failed spectacularly!
Tom T – You make some seriously good points about reproducibility versus peer review.
My take on any research is this:
It’s not science until it has been reproduced several times over. No matter HOW good the math looks, or HOW smart everyone thinks you are, or how pretty your graphs are – if you can’t reproduce it on demand, it isn’t scientific – it’s just hinting in that direction.
Example: The very mysterious aligned and elliptical Carolina bays (over 45,000 of them at last count) have had many people suggest many possible causes. The entirety of one of those possible causes is aeolian – caused by the winds. Most researchers right now believe that aeolian is the answer to the riddle.
However, only ONE experiment has EVER been run to “prove or disprove” the aeolian hypothesis. And that was an experiment run by a college student using an oscillating fan and sand, and which he ran only long enough to START to create something vaguely ellitical. After the equivalent of about 8 CYCLES< he looked at the unfinished results and declared that he had seen enough. To any even moderately skeptical observer, the experiment was wholly inadequate and run for far too few cycles. In addition, his bays don't even LOOK anything like the Carolina bays.
His research paper was never published in any journal to this day. But that doesn't stop any number of scientists from footnoting it and claiming that it proves how the Carolina bays were formed.
No, it does not.
The even WEIRDER thing is that NONE of those who've quoted his non-published paper has ever sat down to replicate his work. After 38 years, it still stands alone. His 1977 experiment cost perhaps $75 US in today's money. Yet no one has lifted a finger to try to replicate it.
“The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research”
And then along came climate “science” and climate “scientists”.
I’m shocked I tell you, shocked!
(Um…not really.)
Retraction Watch. The article list is here. Seem to be all bio-med.
Makes sense. Lives are at stake in medicine, so it’s important to eye those studies closely. Climate science…ha!
Thanks Nick.
Seems to be a problem with this branch of science.
In case you or anyone else cares, Frances Kelsey died recently at age 101.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey#Work_at_the_FDA_and_thalidomide
Thalidomide was banned after it was discovered to be the cause of severe birth defects. Later it was discovered to be useful for:
… a number of conditions including: erythema nodosum leprosum, multiple myeloma and a number of other cancers, for some symptoms of HIV/AIDS, Crohn’s disease, sarcoidosis, graft-versus-host disease, rheumatoid arthritis and a number of skin conditions that have not responded to usual treatment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
Any drug that is sufficiently powerful to cure you, also has the power to harm you.
97% of these retracted authors are Chinese.
Those dumb Chinese!! They really should learn how to rig the system and not get caught by buddy review (sark off)
2900 journals? By one publisher? Does science need so many?
James Schrumpf writes:
It’s getting very specialized out there, James. I can’t say for sure, but there’s probably a Journal of Left-Handed Hamster Science out there unless it’s been broken up into the Journal of Solid Color Left-handed Hamster Science and the Journal of Mottled Left-Handed Hamster Science.
Whether or not science needs that many journals is not the issue. I’m thinking it’s whether or not there are sufficient journals to publish all the papers produced by the glut of PhDs being produced. It’s either publish, or learn to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”
The publishers are just responding to the increased demand of the market.
Me thinks we need a journal on peer reviewing.
Now that made me laugh out loud!
Well done Springer for locating tip of the iceberg!
Now really start digging, the major policy driving, peer review issues that are so alarming obvious a collusion of reviews! Fake reviews are easy, look to the organised contrived will not fail “reviews”
http://link.springer.com/search?query=The+Publisher+and+Editor+retract+this+article+in+accordance+with+the+recommendations+of+the+Committee+on+Publication+Ethics+%28COPE%29&date-facet-mode=between&facet-start-year=2015&previous-start-year=1995&facet-end-year=2015&previous-end-year=2015
Springer list of retracted papers. All appear to be medical in nature and authored by Chinese authors.
So now they know to use real “fake” email accounts. (Or is that fake ” real” emails??)
For new readers who might have missed Prof. Rick Trebino’s experience in getting published, this is well worth reading.
So if I am reading this right…the papers were published based on favorable reviews, but the reviews were contrived; generated by the authors or someone in league with the authors. I imagine that these 64 papers are just the tip of the iceberg, and that the majority of the cheaters were a little more intelligent in hiding their tracks. This would explain the plethora of inane ‘peer-reviewed’ papers out there in many different fields, but particularly in climate change.
“these 64 papers are just the tip of the iceberg”
On the other hand, we don’t know the number that were discovered before, during, or just after review.
How can it be broken if they found the deception during their review ?
They weren’t found during review. Hence retraction. But 64 papers out of 2900 journals (publishing maybe 100 each per year) is hardly broken. The scam can’t go far. Basically, the author recommends a well-known reviewer supplying a fake address, and impersonates. That gets found out pretty soon.
It’s only the latest 64 out of 2900 journals. They had already retracted 43 earlier this year for faked reviews. They’ve retracted about 1,500 papers since 2012, about 15% being due to faked reviews. There are likely more to follow. (info from Retraction Watch…)
Accept that crap papers get reviewed and published all the time. Nick, even you would agree to that. So I would indeed say it is broken.
…except that “pretty soon” means after publication, when damage has been done.
Also, while Springer prints 2900 journals…”Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals…” – nothing is said about the other 2890 journals.
Nick, how do you feel about the tactics employed by the ‘hockey team’ as revealed in Climategate emails…do you acknowledge that they conspired to ‘bend’ the peer review process…if not necessarily ‘break’ it?
Obviously not soon enough
“Broken” because the papers were published, I would say.
Every business, and any activity where people have some stake in the outcome, has some level of fraud. Banks suffer fraud all the time, but they are not broken. It looks like less than 1 in 1000 papers published are affected here.
And yes, bad papers get published. Always have. And it’s much more than 1 in 1000. Science manages despite that.
Most journals use a system that is hard to fool. I review papers for an Elsevier journal. It’s like internet backing. I am a known person on the Elsevier system, with a password. I can see all the papers I am supposed to have reviewed. A fake review is pointless unless it is by a person that will impress the editor, and such a person is almost certain to be on the system. Any decent program should be able to check for attempts to add a fake ID, since the fake person has to be adequately identified to impress the editor.
Come on Nick, you are pretending only those that got caught are the ones that are gaming the process when in reality they are the tip of the iceberg. They caught the same % as cops catching drunk drivers. For every 1 drunk driver caught I bet there are at least 100 that got away wih it. Just like illegal immigration, etc. 64 caught another 6400 got away with it in 2014. BROKEN.
Nick Stokes says:
Every business, and any activity where people have some stake in the outcome, has some level of fraud.
You must be looking in the mirror, Nick.
I was a real estate broker for many years until I retired from that business in the late ’90’s (I worked almost exclusively with first time home buyers, and the same buyers who wanted a second or third house — or more). My business was selling houses. I had a big stake in the outcome: if I didn’t sell, I didn’t get any income.
I never defrauded anyone. Every person I sold a house to was because I truly believed it was the best thing for them. There were plenty of times I talked a buyer out of a particular property that would have been an easy sale, because I could see problems with it.
And you know what? Not one of them ever lost money. In fact, quite a few of them have more than a million in equity today. Honesty really is the best policy. There is a long term pay back, just as there is with dishonesty.
So speak for yourself and your business, OK?
“I never defrauded anyone.”
I’m talking about the line of business. Is there no fraud in the real estate broking business – anywhere, ever? If there is, does that mean it is broken?
“I never defrauded anyone.”
So, that would make you one of the 999 in 1000 (using Stoke’s numbers), which is normal.
Most businesses are okay, but some people in them are not, and credit info gets pinched. But most people don’t do that, which is normal.
And most scientists are normal as well.
Nick Stokes says:
Is there no fraud in the real estate broking business – anywhere, ever? If there is, does that mean it is broken?
Of course there is fraud found among brokers. There is fraud everywhere. The difference is that it is swiftly punished by the law, and punished severely. Furthermore, when a broker is convicted of fraud the next step is the customer’s lawyer coming after the broker. Many a crooked agent has lost everything due to thinking they can swindle someone. In addition, the managing broker is legally liable for the actions of his agents, whether they are just sales people, or brokers. The managing broker cannot claim ignorance if they commit fraud.
As a result, there is not much fraud in the business (there are always some unhappy customers, but the issue is fraud). The Real Estate Commissioner has the authority to suspend or revoke a license, based on nothing more than a piece of evidence — and that evidence can be pretty flimsy. No arrest or trial is necesary. To bring the point home, the Commissioner mails every licensee a quarterly list of those agents who have had their licenses suspended or revoked by the Commissioner; if suspended, for how long, and for what actions, and whether the acts were fraudulent or merely unethical. Unethical actions, even if not illegal, can get someone’s license suspended too.
That is completely different from the climate peer review system, which is riddled with fraud, self-dealing, and gaming of the system — as we saw repeatedly throughout the Climategate email dump. Reprobates like Michael Mann actively worked to get people fired simply because they had a different scientific point of view than he and his pals had. And in some cases he succeeded, and bragged about it.
The problem is there is nothing equivalent to a Commissioner in the climate peer review/journal conspiracy, with authority to weed out the bad apples. And when there is no policing of a system like that, a corollary of Gresham’s Law takes place: the bad scientists run the good scientists out.
It is no wonder that the climate peer review system has been so thoroughly corrupted. You have self-serving insiders in cahoots with journals, and they’re all making piles of money off the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ scare. Anyone familiar with human nature would be very surprised if that recipe did not result in the broken ‘pal review’ system.
“Men are bad unless compelled to be good.”
~ Niccolo Machiavelli
No one compels the climate peer review players who are gaming the system to be honest. So they’re not.
“The problem is there is nothing equivalent to a Commissioner in the climate peer review/journal conspiracy, with authority to weed out the bad apples.”
There is – COPE. The next comment (JohnWho) links to it.
And the action here was prompt – these papers seem to have been published in 2015.
As with your broking, transgressions are sparse, 64 out of 100,000s. And the reason the same – penalties in terms of career damage are severe, and detection very likely.
There is – COPE.
What good are they? After Climategate I, II and III, did they take action that made any difference?
No.
Tha same jamokes are still gaming the system. So once again:
The problem is there is nothing equivalent to a Commissioner in the climate peer review/journal conspiracy, with authority to weed out the bad apples.
Climate peer review is broken. It will never be fixed unless there is punishment for those who misuse it.
Simply removing a paper that has been shown to be fraudulent does little or nothing in the way of correcting the problem. They’re just more careful next time. The problem in climate peer review is that there is no punishment for fraud.
When Michael Mann bragged that he had gotten people fired for simply taking a scientific position he didn’t like, Mann himself should have been fired from every related position. Instead, his cheerleaders (including Nick) circled the wagons to protect him.
When universities and the federal government bureaucracy condones and enables fraud, it is no surprise that it is so rampant. The dishonest scientists, reviewers, bureaucrats and politicians have driven out the honest scientists. Now we have Elmer Gantry in charge of “climate change” propaganda, and the truth is not in any of them.
“Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement.”
Would that be this:
http://publicationethics.org/news/cope-statement-inappropriate-manipulation-peer-review-processes
I don’t think this means that peer review is broken, as the title says. It appears to be a limited problem related to two facts:
– Chinese difficulty in writing English papers that makes some of them hire the service of agencies to handle the translation and submission.
– Lack of ethics in many Chinese companies as we already know. Some of those agencies were offering fake reviewers.
The underlying problem is that a lot of journals offer the possibility or even request that authors suggest reviewers for their article. This is very convenient for editors but it is a conflict of interest that contaminates the process. The authors of the work should not have any say on who should review their work under any circumstance. Sadly I have been a witness of important authors openly discussing reviewers to their work over the phone with the editor of their submitted or soon to be submitted work. The peer review process has a little door for little scientists and a big door for big scientists.
Peer-review is a myth.
of course it is….it’s not even a good speal chex
CAGW flavoured Climate Science joins the ranks of Linkedin and Trip Advisor
It can’t be all bad. Peer review revealed in climategate emails showed how it worked to get rid of the MWP, LIA and the creation of the rising blade of the hockey stick – Since Mike’s “Nature trick” was revealed, I’m sure Nature immediately investigated their papers. Also, since over 95% of papers eventually turn out to be totally worthless, peer review at the best of times hasn’t really worked that well. I wonder how many worthy papers were rejected as well.
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists in the 1920s ridiculed and possibly hounded Alfred Wegener of continental drift notoriety into an early grave (died 1930) and had to wait another thirty years for the theory to be brought forth repackaged with fanfare as the new theory of plate tectonics. Oh there has been rationalization in relatively recent years, too, to support this dental mechanic type terminolgy, but really it was renamed out of shame, a desire to bury the embarrassing Wegener stuff and dare I say D’Nile. The irony of it all was framed by the president of the AAPG at the annual meeting in 1928 when he said, to the effect, that if we are to buy Wegener’s silly idea of continents shifting around like that, we would have to forget half of what we have learned over the past century. Well, we had to wait another 30 years to forget half of what we had learned in a century and a third.
I was in the middle. Having had all these courses with geosynclines, eugeosynclines, miogeosynclines, zeugogeosynclines…..Do geo gollyists still do all this Zeugo hugo, gee-o-myo stuff? I haven’t seen such pagan language in a long time – I guess they quietly got rid of it all. After all it was embarrassing enough to have to forget a century of a science without hollering it out that we had to retract 10,000 papers. I can only hope that this will finally be buried for good when 100,000 climate papers and 50,000 biomedical papers or so get dumped. Probably we will recognize some of the former climate scientists as bank tellers and insurance salesmen in a few years. There will probably be research into converting thousands of tons of these goofy journals into fire logs for the poor in the coming cold period.
exactly Gary….peer review only works with what you think you know
… which is another way of saying that peer review is there to make sure the orthodoxy looks over radical ideas and gets their shot at denying them their day in the sun.
Well said.
Obviously, these papers were so ahead of their time that there just were no peers up to the task available.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
Remember this when someone tries to tell the “science is settled” regarding global warming or anything else. It is, if it’s been faked.
Cute how they say this with a straight face. If they had taken it seriously, they wouldn’t have had to go through this review process.
Going further, Retraction Watch reports that there have been roughly 1,500 papers retracted across various science journals since 2012, with approximately 15% of them being for faked peer reviews.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/19/leading-science-publisher-retracts-dozens-of-papers-for-fake-peer-reviews/
‘Once, however, we recognize the basically antagonistic positions of the “peers” and Type I research, the urgent need for a reform of the peer-review system becomes self- evident. One does not need to be a jurist to comprehend that in a fair and just system, one cannot use the opinions of a party to a dispute to judge the validity of the opinion of his antagonist. Yet this is what peer review amounts to when dealing with Type I research.
Equally urgent is the need for establishing an appeal mechanism, so that a wrongly “accused” applicant can defend himself.
The harm the current version of the peer-review system may do is by no means limited to causing a few scientists to be ostracized because of their pursuit of Type I ideas- ideas, that is, running counter to established concepts. The greater damage is to a whole generation of young scientists, who discover that the surest way to succeed in science is not to seek truth but to report only such findings and express only such opinions that are sweet to the ears and eyes of anointed “peers.” When enough scientists choose that course, the credibility of all’scientists will dwindle. In the long run, a retreat from science and from a free rational way of life may well follow. Hopefully, however, that will not be how the story ends’. (Gilbert N. Ling, Physiol. Chem. & Physics 10 1978)
http://www.physiologicalchemistryandphysics.com/pdf/PCP10-95_ling.pdf
I wonder if they were all computer-generated like others in the past?
I mean apparently pal is so incredibly predictable that nearly anyone or anything can get a paper to pass their so-called peer review process….
I just got “A Disgrace to the Profession” in the mail and am about half way through it. It’s pretty clear that Dr. Mann’s work should have been withdrawn.