He Hunts Sloppy Scientists. He’s Finding Lots of Prey.; The New York Times, February 2, 2024

Matt Richtel, The New York Times ; He Hunts Sloppy Scientists. He’s Finding Lots of Prey.

"Sholto David, 32, has a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Newcastle University in England. He is also developing an expertise in spotting errors in scientific papers. Most recently, and notably, he discovered flawed or manipulated data in studies conducted by top executives at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The institute said that it was requesting retraction of six manuscripts and had found 31 other manuscripts that required corrections.

From his home in Wales, Dr. David scours new research publications for images that are mislabeled and manipulated, and he regularly finds mistakes, or malfeasance, in some of the most prominent scientific journals. Accuracy is vital, as peer-reviewed papers often provide the evidence for drug trials or further lines of research. Dr. David said that the frequency of such errors suggests an underlying problem for science.

His interview with The New York Times has been edited and condensed...

Does this call into question the peer-review process?

I think that’s something that people need to think about. These are top scientific journals with errors that escaped peer review. Maybe the peer reviewers are looking for other things. Maybe they like to look at the methods or the conclusions more carefully than the results. But, yeah, it does make me think that people should question how effective the peer-review process has been."

A price to be paid for open-access academic publishing; The Guardian, March 13, 2019

Letters, The Guardian; A price to be paid for open-access academic publishing

"The headlong rush towards further adoption of open-access models demands careful thought, says Prof Sarah Kember. Elsevier is a strong supporter of open access, says its vice-president of global policy, Gemma Hersh. The UK has moved further and faster than any other major research funding country, says Stephen Lotinga. It is difficult to find good (unpaid) reviewers for every article in scientific journals, says John Boardman"

Starving for Wisdom; New York Times, 4/16/15

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; Starving for Wisdom:

"“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

That epigram from E.O. Wilson captures the dilemma of our era. Yet the solution of some folks is to disdain wisdom...

So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well...

My second reason: We need people conversant with the humanities to help reach wise public policy decisions, even about the sciences. Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions: Where should Facebook set its privacy defaults, and should it tolerate glimpses of nudity? Should Twitter close accounts that seem sympathetic to terrorists? How should Google handle sex and violence, or defamatory articles?...

Likewise, when the President’s Council on Bioethics issued its report in 2002, “Human Cloning and Human Dignity,” it cited scientific journals but also Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Even science depends upon the humanities to shape judgments about ethics, limits and values."