Over a week ago Retraction Watch featured the story of a journal that took 13 months to reject a paper, then published a plagiarized version days later; a look at whether institutions gaslight whistleblowers; and news that a medical school had put a researcher found to have committed misconduct in charge of a grant. Oh — and it was RW’s eighth birthday. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A star may not be quite as bright, but an astronomer deserves a gold star for retracting his findings within 24 hours of posting them, and thanking those that helped him find the error.
• A study “asked whether the top scientific journals, Nature and Science, represented men and women equally as authors, subjects, and objects in photographs. Overwhelmingly, women were underrepresented in these magazines, an effect that was apparent even in advertisements and stock photographs.” (FACETS Journal)
• “A scientific paper can mislead,” says Andrew Gelman. “People can read a paper, or see later popularizations of the work, and think that ‘science shows’ something that science didn’t show.”
• Sometimes, maybe it’s not such a welcome development when a U.S. president cites your paper. (Maxine Joselow, E&E News)
• “Don’t let your h index define your science … but you can be proud of it nonetheless,” says Andrew Hendry. (Eco-Evo Evo-Eco)
• “India has vowed to end the “menace of predatory journals” after an investigation by a group of international media organizations discovered that many publishers of such journals are based in Hyderabad.” (Michael Allen, Physics World)
• “These Professors Don’t Work for a Predatory Publisher. It Keeps Claiming They Do.” (Emma Pettit, Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Far be it from me to suggest that the whole edifice of medical journal publication is overdue to crumble in the face of open publication on pre-print servers, allowing real time discussion of full data sets, and creating a path to recognition that does not depend upon the whims of editors bound to the medical-industrial complex.” Richard Lehman has written his last weekly journal roundup for The BMJ. He’ll be missed.
• Elsevier is acquiring Aries Systems, a maker of editorial content management systems used by many journals. (press release)
• “Our other work  failed to inform ongoing policy discussions and the efforts of other researchers for several months as we waited on eventual publication.” Rohan Khera contrasts the pre-preprint era with the preprint era. (The BMJ)
• “‘[P]redatory publishing’ never really became a big thing, when seen in relation to the total outcome of scholarly communication,” says Lambert Heller. (LSE Impact Blog)
• Why Czech politicians are obsessed with titles — and why it leads to plagiarism. Daniela Lazarová talks to the “former president of the Accreditation Commission, Vladimíra Dvořáková, about plagiarism and its roots.” (Radio Praha)
• Journal editor Bernd Pulverer provides two examples of “why machines cannot easily replace humans for image integrity screening.” After all, “duplicating soil would be truly potty.”