Included in the news this month are articles related to March's theme of "Authorship and Contributorship", together with conflicts of interest, data and reproducibility, ethical oversight and peer review
Authorship
A paper recently published in PNAS proposes changes to journal authorship policies and procedures to provide insight into which author is responsible for which contributions, better assurance that the list is complete, and clearly articulated standards to justify earning authorship credit.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/26/1715374115
Conflicts of interest
This article on COI in peer review concludes that journals should develop COI policies for reviewers and editors, as well as for authors
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192623318754792
While henceforth Nature journals will require authors to disclose non-financial, as well as financial conflicts of interest
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01420-8
Data and reproducibility
APA has released two new sets of reporting standards to enhance the assessment of methodological integrity; one covering quantitative research and enhancing reproducibility, and the other looking at qualitative research
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-amp0000263.pdf
Sabina Leonelli highlights concerns over how big and open data are currently managed and how these concerns might be addressed
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/02/14/without-urgent-action-big-and-open-data-may-widen-existing-inequalities-and-social-divides/
Ethical oversight
This interesting paper describes one institution’s experience of developing research integrity in line with insights from contemporary research on best practices in learning design, universal design, and faculty involvement
https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-018-0046-2
and the authors wrote a blog about their experience
http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2018/02/27/research-integrity-training-by-stealth/
Peer review
A US court has required a publisher to breach its confidentiality policy and identify an article's anonymous peer reviewers.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/unusual-move-judge-grants-crossfits-request-unmask-anonymous-peer-reviewers
Publons offers some suggestions about how to end reviewer fraud
https://publons.com/blog/lets-end-reviewer-fraud/
And in other news
This blog discusses the tensions in the governance of research and the need for social science research to demonstrate impact beyond the academy
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/02/26/resist-welcome-co-opt-ignore-the-pressures-and-possibilities-of-the-ref-and-impact/