Individual integrity and public morality in scientific publishing

Science and science reporting are under threat. Knowingly or not, researchers and clinicians are part of this debacle. This is not due so much to the notorious replication crisis, as to our acceptance of lowering common morality for personal gains, including the widespread, deprecable phenomenon of predatory publishing. Rather than fiercefully countering this loathsome practice, academics are accepting, often supporting a masquerade solution: paying several thousand dollars to publish for all their own papers. This new policy will create a disparity across richer and poorer disciplines; will result in concentrating even more in the hands of large, rich, Western institutions, also penalising younger researchers; will kill observational studies and exploratory research; and will make disseminating science depending more on finances than on quality. This article calls for the full awareness of the academic community on the risks of the current situation in scientific publishing

Politics dictating on science is like a gunshot in a concert:Commentary to “Havana Syndrome: A Post Mortem”, by Robert E. Bartholomew and Robert W. Baloh

In their requiem to the so-called Havana syndrome, Bartholomew and Baloh list five factors that contributed to its creation. I will elaborate on one of them, namely that this novel entity was forged with unreliable data

Items on the Left Are Better Remembered

We report evidence of a new phenomenon from three experiments: a leftward bias when people try to remember visually presented information. Experiments 1 and 2 showed lateral leftward biases in memory in a large (total N>60000) sample of participants, with data collected via the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) web site. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of a leftwards bias in short-term memory with a more intensive data collection

Why we publish papers reporting findings we may not believe

This volume of Cortex includes a paper (Freedman et al.) that reported evidence that an aspect of Psi may be possible under specific experimental conditions. The authors hypothesized that Psi could be inhibited by frontal lobe processes and used rTMS to reduce cortical excitability in the frontal lobes following the logic that such reduction would improve Psi capabilities. There are many studies that have used this rationale to investigate cognitive control processes. Despite the apparently supernatural theory articulated by Freedman et al, the experiment seemed to have been carefully conducted, and was well reported, so it was sent for external review. After two rounds of revision, the reviewers and the action editor were reasonably satisfied with the changes made, including several caveats to the conclusions of the study, and eventually the paper was approved for publication