Retraction Watch is a blog which seeks to highlight the latest scientific retractions. The blog started in August 2010 by Ivan Oransky (executive editor of Reuters Heath and teachers medical journalism a New York University) and Adam Marcus (managing editor of Anaesthesiology News).

So why a blog on retractions?

1. Science takes justifiable pride in the fact that it is self-correcting - most of the time….Retractions are therefore a window into the scientific process.
2. Hope the blog will form an informal repository for the retractions we find and might even spur the creation of a retraction database.
3. Highlighting the retractions will give journalists more tools to uncover fraud and misuse of funds.
4. Interested in whether journals are consistent….with printing retractions.

Ivan Ornsky and Adam Marcus - First Post August 2010

Example of the retractions published in December 2012:

• Retractions three and four for Hopkins cancer biomarker group - 31 December 2012
• Neuroscientist made up data in NIH grant applications, says ORI - 28 December 2012
• ORI sanctions former Texas Tech postdoc for falsification, fabrication, plagiarism - 28 December 2012

To find out more go to Retraction Watch

As part of next week's Research Week events, a Future Researchers day is being held at the St Lucia campus. It's open to anyone interested in doing Research Higher Degree studies.

UQ Faculties and Institutes will be running information sessions detailing projects, career prospects and upcoming research opportunities. You can also chat to RHD students and find out about scholarships.

DATE: Wednesday 26 September
TIME: 10am - 3pm
LOCATION: Hawken Engineering Building (#50)
For program information and registration visit
www.uq.edu.au/grad-school/future-researchers
or call 3346 0510

ORCID - Open Researcher & Contributor ID - is an international, interdisciplinary, open and not-for-profit organisation committed to enhancing the scientific discovery process, improving collaboration and increasing the efficiency of research funding.

ORCID aims to achieve this by solving the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications. A recent article in Nature explains the problems of indistinguishable names in scholarly records and outlines ORCID strategies to address this.

By creating an international registry of presistent unique identifiers for individual researchers, ORCID will present an open and transparent linking mechanism with other ID schemes and research objects, including research grants, publications and patents.

ORCID is currently open for individual and organisational memberships, and aims to be operational in late 2012.

JISC News reports that the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has "issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Their findings are presented in One Culture, along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries, and funding agencies. The recommendations are "urgent, pointed, and even disruptive," write the authors. "To address them, we must recognize the impediments of tradition that hinder the contemporary university's ability to adapt to, support, or sustain this emerging research over time."

The Digging into Data Challenge was launched in 2009 to better understand how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Scholars in these disciplines now use massive databases of materials that range from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data such as web searches, sensor data, or cell phone records. The Challenge seeks to discover what new, computationally based research methods might be applied to these sources."

Read more at JISC News..... or access the report to understand how big data might affect your research.