MDPI changes the content of a published paper even without any correction note – read yourself

We are completely loosing track if “deemed by the Editorial Office to be a reasonable request” is leading to modifications of text, images or data. And this happened already as I learned recently.

James Clear adds the reason

Truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong … Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence.” … Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe … If you want people to adopt your beliefs, you need to act more like a scout and less like a soldier. At the center of this approach is a question Tiago Forte poses beautifully, “Are you willing to not win in order to keep the conversation going?”

Hard to accept for a scientist but probably true.

James claims

At this point, I feel bleak at the prospect of typing them out again. The problems with overpublication, ‘publish or perish’ culture, abusive lab environments, analytical flexibility, p-hacking, clinical trial registration games, grant front-running, intellectual capture, nonsense journals, fake journals, peer review manipulation, moral entrepreneurship, etc. precede the present discussions of paper mills and active falsification/fabrication cases…
I have tried at least four times in my memory to write out and codify how I would start an institute to combat these problems. Specifically, a formal organization under a 501c3 structure designed to address the problem.

In Germany we have the IQWIQ, an independent Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care who examines the benefits and harms of medical interventions for patients. But they don’t care about all the medical nonsense studies around. And without PubPeer we wouldn’t even know the nonsense…