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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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The solution to climate science is simple and comes from medicine:
Require researchers to register their predictions with the government beforehand, so that as weather data comes in, it can be evaluated against unmoving goalposts.
“A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000.”
http://www.nature.com/news/registered-clinical-trials-make-positive-findings-vanish-1.18181
The thing driving us critics insane of course is (1) the unwillingness of climate scientists to make clear predictions ahead of time, (2) the memory-holing of predictions that were made, and (3) grasping on to things that happen (e.g. the west-coast drought, snow in Boston, even) as ‘validation’ of climate change after the fact when such events were never predicted in the first place.
A registration system is exactly what critics should demand in climate science. The model is already there in US law. If climate scientists resist, they will be unmasked.
If you want to win, this is what you do.
(I posed this on one other thread, but I want Anthony Watts specifically to take notice.)
Corruption in the peer-review process has existed for many years now. Scientists know this. Nobody has done anything about it, and nothing has really changed despite it being known. Numerous scientific frauds have been uncovered over the years. People with letters after their name, like Michael Mann, have brought the field of climatology into disrepute.
The resignation letter of Hal Lewis (October 6th, 2010) said it all, as per the following extract:
“When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.”
Mervyn – All true and Mother Nature will make it irrefutable.
Predictions that are holding are made public at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com and also in a peer reviewed paper published in Energy and Environment, vol. 25, No. 8, 1455-1471.