Pere Puigdomènech

From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new study published today in the journal PNAS. Although concerns about scientific misconduct typically focus on isolated individuals, the study uncovered sophisticated global networks of people and entities that systematically collaborate to undermine the integrity of academic publishing. According to the authors, the problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is growing at a faster rate than that of legitimate scientific publications.

An international team of researchers publishes a review of the complex environmental impacts of genetically modified crops in the journal Science. According to the study, widespread adoption by some of the world's largest agricultural countries has had mixed results for biodiversity, deforestation and human health, depending on the specific characteristics of these crops and the regions involved. 

In a recent study of the experiences of biomedical researchers in Spain, 43% of respondents admitted to having intentionally committed some form of scientific misconduct. The most frequent kind of misconduct was false authorship of scientific articles: 35% of the 403 respondents said they had been involved in some instance of it, says the study published in the journal Accountability in Research. Ten per cent of respondents reported a lack of informed consent, and 3.6 per cent admitted to having been involved at least once in falsification or manipulation of data.

The Spanish Confederation of Scientific Societies (COSCE) has just published a report, submitted to the EU, which proposes and compares different possibilities for reform of the regulatory framework for genome editing techniques.