Flagging fraud

A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct. The website -- called linkurl:Scientific Red Cards;http://www.scientificredcards.org/ -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim. The database might also prevent researchers from citing papers that they don't even realize are fraudulent, said Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in neurobiology at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who unveiled the new website last month at a workshop in Madrid, Spain, organized by the European Science Foundation's Research Integrity Forum. After misconduct is detected in a published paper, "sometimes the paper is not retracted, depending on the policy of the journal, and even if the paper is retracted sometimes it's still...