Background: Predatory behavior in open access peer reviewed scientific journals seems to be increasing. It is subject to serious discussions between editors, authors, and publishers. Herein we discuss some characteristics of electronic communication in science, the reasons for potential misuse, and present some entropy calculations. Theoretical considerations: Publication of research articles uses visual information transfer, and seldom acoustic communication. Advantages of open access electronic journals include prompt and worldwide distribution, free access, and several free re-use rights. Disadvantages might be seen in non congruent business models of authors and publishers, which include impact of financial issues on scientific quality and easy to perform, hard to detect manipulation of published data and their sources. Present stage: Citation Index (SI) and Journal Impact Factor (JIP) are the principal sources which are thought to guarantee the article’s quality and author’s prestige. Authors try to publish in and publishers try to offer journals with high SI and JIP. Independent review processes should serve to maintain the article’s quality. Reviewers are invited electronically in both conventional paper printed and electronically distributed journals. They are requested to act at their earliest convenience. Reviews are as all fast electronic information distribution exposed to become manipulated, in politics, commerce, and science as well. Proposal and perspectives: E

Meta-analysis results depend on statistical assumptions that are partly determined by the software used to conduct the analysis. Meta-epidemiological studies show that Review Manager remains the most frequently reported software in published intervention meta-analyses, but software versions, estimators, interval methods, heterogeneity specifications, and other analytical outputs are often incompletely described. This methods-focused narrative tutorial provides a structured comparison of selected meta-analysis software platforms used in health-related evidence synthesis, including Review Manager, Meta-DiSc, Comprehensive Meta-Analysis, R, and Stata. The comparison focuses on how these platforms implement or restrict key modeling choices relevant to intervention/effect-size meta-analysis and diagnostic test accuracy meta-analysis, including between-study variance estimation, confidence-interval construction, prediction intervals, sparse-data handling, meta-regression, hierarchical diagnostic accuracy modeling, transparency, and reproducibility. The article also distinguishes legacy graphical interfaces, updated web-based platforms, commercial software, and script-based environments, emphasizing how differences in flexibility, auditability, and reporting can affect interpretation. The aim is to help authors, reviewers, editors, and clinical readers recognize when software choices affect model specification, uncertainty quantification, heterogeneity assessment, sparse-data handling, diagnostic accuracy modeling, and reproducibility. Software should therefore be reported as part of the statistical specification of a meta-analysis, not only as a computational detail.

In June 2015, invitations were sent by email to 151 APAME journals to participate in an online survey with an objective of gaining insight into the common publication misconduct encountered by APAME editors. The survey, conducted through SurveyMonkey over a 20-day-period, comprised 10 questions with expansions to allow anecdotes limited to 400 characters, estimated to take less than 10 minutes to complete. Only one invitation was issued per journal, targeting (in order of priority) editors, editorial board members and editorial staff, and limited by email availability. 54 (36%) journals responded. 98% of respondents held Editor or Editorial Board positions. All respondent journals have editorial policies on publication ethics and 96% provide instructions related to ethics. 45% use anti-plagiarism software to screen manuscripts, the most popular being iThenticate, CrossCheck and Turnitin. Up to 50% of journals had encountered studies without IRB approval. Author misconduct encountered were (in rank order): plagiarism (75%), duplicate publication (58%), unjustified authorship (39%), authorship disputes (33%), data falsification (29%), data/image manipulation (27%), conflict of interest (25%), copyright violation (17%) and breach of confidentiality (10%). Reviewer misconduct encountered were: conflict of interest (19%), plagiarism (17%), obstructive behavior (17%), abusive language (13%) and breach of confidentiality (13%). Notwithstanding the limitations of the survey and the r

Western blotting is a standard laboratory method used to detect proteins and assess their expression levels. Unfortunately, poor western blot image display practices and a lack of detailed methods reporting can limit a reader’s ability to evaluate or reproduce western blot results. While several groups have studied the prevalence of image manipulation or provided recommendations for improving western blotting, data on the prevalence of common publication practices are scarce. We systematically examined 551 articles published in the top 25% of journals in neurosciences ( n = 151) and cell biology ( n = 400) that contained western blot images, focusing on practices that may omit important information. Our data show that most published western blots are cropped and blot source data are not made available to readers in the supplement. Publishing blots with visible molecular weight markers is rare, and many blots additionally lack molecular weight labels. Western blot methods sections often lack information on the amount of protein loaded on the gel, blocking steps, and antibody labeling protocol. Important antibody identifiers like company or supplier, catalog number, or RRID were omitted frequently for primary antibodies and regularly for secondary antibodies. We present detailed descriptions and visual examples to help scientists, peer reviewers, and editors to publish more informative western blot figures and methods. Additional resources include a toolbox to help scientists p

Members of the editorial board at the University of Pennsylvania have now had about 6 months to get properly settled in as editors, reading papers with an editor’s scrutiny. And more often than we would like, we are finding a need to scratch our heads regarding how primary image data have been massaged to prepare figures. We’ve run into several examples in these last six months that have prompted long discussions about what is and is not permitted in terms of image presentation and manipulation. Thus, we decided it was time to be explicit and to establish some new rules going forward. Most of the examples have been related to gels — blots of all types: Western, Northern, Southern, and PCR. We’ve commented in the past that it is not acceptable to reuse bands previously published or those that have been rotated in any way; this amounts to fraudulent data manipulation. While that much is clear, a grayer area relates to rearranging lanes; it has long been accepted that an author can splice noncontiguous lanes together in a presented figure, but it has always been our assumption that this is only allowed when the lanes were run on the same gel at the same time. We emphasize this because we have been surprised that a small but not insignificant minority does not share this approach. So we highlight again what the vast majority of our authors already know: you cannot mix and match bands from various gels that were run at different times or exposed for different amounts of time and p

Abstract Western blotting is a standard laboratory method used to detect proteins and assess their expression levels. Unfortunately, poor western blot image display practices and a lack of detailed methods reporting can limit a reader’s ability to evaluate or reproduce western blot results. While several groups have studied the prevalence of image manipulation or provided recommendations for improving western blotting, data on the prevalence of common publication practices are scarce. We systematically examined 551 articles published in the top 25% of journals in neurosciences (n=151) and cell biology (n=400) that contained western blot images, focusing on practices that may omit important information. Our data show that most published western blots are cropped and blot source data are not made available to readers in the supplement. Publishing blots with visible molecular weight markers is rare, and many blots additionally lack molecular weight labels. Western blot methods sections often lack information on the amount of protein loaded on the gel, blocking steps and antibody labeling protocol. Important antibody identifiers like source, catalog number or RRID were omitted frequently for primary antibodies, and regularly for secondary antibodies. We present detailed descriptions and visual examples to help scientists, peer reviewers and editors to publish more informative western blot figures and methods. Additional resources include a toolbox to help scientists produce more