You could also say that positive findings are jucier than negative ones. And even the scientific world, or at least publishing industry falls for this...

"Perhaps I should start bringing in nets or so". You defintely should. I am surprised this is even an issue. Nets or any type of bag like:

Not that it matters much, but it is intriguing: is anyone doing research (a sort of meta-research), on the rationale for performing such micro photoshop clonings, which do not look like they can help conveying any message?

Maybe it is the time to start calling him Mr Raoult.

And a key aspect is that even there WERE issues, it is a better way of doing things, provided the issues don't balloon in extravagant proportions. It is a neurotic obsession of the administration to try and prevent ANY issue at all. At Zero degree kelvin there are no issues any longer.

Indeed. In France the main job of administration has become to invent ways of scrutinizing or preventing suspected waste on the researchers' part. Andre Lwoff was optimistic when he said in the 70s: researchers know that no administration will ever succeed in preventing them from making discoveries.

Of course there are better ways. There is no reason why skipping a compulsory and tenured travel agency has to go hand in hand with advancing the money.

It sounds like a non-news to me. It will only be virtue signaling (and Nature will love it). Let's not keep forgetting, again and again, that China lives under, well... a dictatorship (while democracies themselves are struggling with science integrity).

Indeed. In practice it is more often male for the simple reason that top positions are still more often held by males, but this is changing, and there is no non-sexist reason to believe that females do not and will not, on average, behave as badly.

Arrêtez de le débiner et essayez d'apprendre un peu d'histoire. Le Versailles de 1880 était décadent (et peut-être même dès 1860).

Anyone who has ever looked at any microphotograph of any tissue from any species stained with any technique knows that the boxed areas have been cloned in Photoshop.

What strikes me most in this fascinating story is the vertiginous amount of time, work, expertise, doggedness and patience needed to debunk a claim which, to a regular MD and PhD in biology like me, with little background in biochemistry, and zero on aequorins, sounds like a total non-starter.

And to be more specific, the vast majority of citations are in papers that do not build on the data they cite, which is thus not "valuable" to them, strictly speaking. The impact factor, for example, is mostly based on citations on a time scale that precludes building anything on the data cited.

The idea that citations reflect how valuable the data is, is quite optimistic, to say the least.

The constructive slant of this nice article obscures the fact that in many cases the whole POINT is to drown the reader in data: to impress the journal and referees by their abundance, to make detailed reviewing impossible, to increase the odds that the paper will be cited for one detail or another.

How do you do this? (Perhaps not very virtuously, I have always refused to put anything on HAL, as being a waste of time and a false good idea, despite CNRS insisting on it. I don't know anyone who uses this platform in biology, and I don't know how it works).

Je ne vous remercie pas d'avoir posté ces extraits: je n'arrive plus à échapper à la fascination morbide de ce ton de larrons en foire, de gorges chaudes et de complicité rigolarde pour débiter un cocktail de crétineries et d'ignominies.