 I'm the co-founder of Retraction Watch and also the executive director co-founder of the Center for Scientific Integrity, which is our parent non-profit 501c3 all that stuff It's a delight to be here. I'm a journalist. That's really what I do I play a sort of scientific integrity person on TV or radio or everyone will have me It's been really nice already to hear a Bit of the sort of prevails that we're in the midst of going through I think particularly from Heather just now It sounded all too familiar the sort of lowering. We've actually Adam and I have cut our salaries to zero Our stats so that our staff can get paid I should say but the all that stuff and Chuck thank you for raising that club thing is I'm going to come back with club But I I think that language maybe it's because I'm a journalist is really critical here So I'm going to tell you what I hope is very quick story I'm not going to talk about Retraction Watch which is our blog which has been doing just over eight years now If you don't know about Retraction Watch obviously go to attraction watch calm But if you don't know about retraction watching this one, we have not been doing a very good job getting out there What I'm going to talk about however is our database which is currently technically in beta But is quite ready Quite soon going to be launched and I want to tell you the story of the problem We're trying to solve or one of the problems We are trying to solve and then try and explain a little bit about how we hope to solve it So one of the issues that happens and I think you're all familiar with this But it's sometimes important to put some data behind things It's actually always important to put the data behind things and journalists. We don't always But and this is it just I'm picking a couple of examples of papers that have demonstrated this phenomenon But here's the problem is that papers that are retracted continue to be cited as if they were never retracted You want to cite or attract a paper go for it. It's got a DOI. It's got this. It's got that you may have a very valid reason Maybe it's to say this has been retracted. That's fine That's not what I'm talking about what I'm talking about is more than 90% of the time when they look when these Researchers by the way, this was a replication of earlier work that they had done in 1999 So it's very consistent again more than 90% of the time The the citations don't acknowledge the retraction. That's sort of bananas quite frankly Again, here's just another more recent paper that came out and I could give you many more references if you'd like I don't want to bore you or take more time, but again, here's another paper that came out just to I mean Obviously, no time travel. This was online first in June not September The major findings citation counts and mentally reader counts continue to grow after attraction again Those citations are positive citations. They're not negative citations. Okay, this is a problem It's only one of the problems you're trying to solve But now, you know with all due respect to any publishers in the room or frankly anyone who's sort of involved in this flow you're all terrible at this and you know And I you can stand and tell me all the things were terrible at and trust me It's a really long list But this is the thing that we want to not be terrible at and we hope we aren't being and I'm going to show you how we're not being Again, they're just one paper. This was by a couple of librarians University of Minnesota Looking just at the mental health literature. What did they actually find when they looked for you know Was this paper retracted which seems like a pretty basic frigging question to ask an answer Okay, 40% of the time it really was no way to tell and again with all due respect to and I don't we pick on cross-refoot since We just heard from Chuck with and it isn't cross-reffs fault publishers don't provide this information Or if they do it's in a way that I can I can barely understand and I'm if there again There's one thing I'm good at it's understanding retraction. So we're dealing with this. This is a big problem So I almost don't blame researchers who don't realize something's been retracted Because you can't figure it out. So what do we want to do and by the way just well before I get to what we want to do And what we're doing Retractions again, I don't think it's gonna be a shock or surprise to anyone The they're on the rise quite markedly so and there's still a rare event and all I always give that caveat But and I don't want to take the time but happy to later explain the little asterisk By 2010 but you know that middle figure as you all know is Sort of a rough estimate at the end of the day number of fractions has you know just gone up and up and up May plateau we just don't know I don't make predictions But it may or may not plateau point is it and again, even though it's rare, you know We're creeping toward you know a tenth of a percent and that's still rare But like what's happening obviously we're better at finding I don't just mean us I actually mean the scientific immunity more than us, but they're on the rise They're a bigger thing to have to think about that's not gonna go away. And so if nobody is actually You know curating them properly and trust me Nobody is and that includes again all the sort of good people bad people otherwise people Okay from PubMed to everybody else. We created a database. This is what our you know funding has been for really And so we have now more than 18,000 retractions in our database Go to anyone else. You will not find them in your attractions. I think right now Scopus is doing best in their sort of south of 11,000 This is a hand curated database, right? This isn't sort of oh just give us a bunch of APIs And we'll pipe it into our database because what I do what's if the story I just told you resonates at all It's that that would be effing useless. So we have done this by hand 18,000 attractions by hand This you can go there right now. We say it doesn't show up on this screenshot, but it's it's in beta for the moment But it's all there go search it search for your favorite or least favorite author your favorite At least favorite journal whatever you'd like. We've got all the metadata in there retraction database or So what's on our roadmap? What are we doing next to close this store? And again, we what do we want to do we would love for this and we've always wanted for this to be piped Into any way that anybody, you know, somebody looks at a paper They should sort of be alerted whether they're realizing or not that that paper's been retracted and this is going to be the best source of that We're not the best source of anything else Like if I ever stand up here and tell you that we're the best source of well anything else Tell me to sit down. Okay, this we are and I'm not even that I'm not gonna apologize for saying that And so we want that to pipe in what do we need? We need two things one is I mentioned at the beginning I'm a journalist. Okay, you can decide whether I'm a good or a bad one, but that's my core sort of identity and what I do I don't know a damn thing about Actually producing I mean we had to hire someone just to reduce this thing which is just not the most I mean, I know COS you were like he was talking about, you know, some issues with with UX like We're 20,000 light years or a year search in the years behind that It's terrible UX fine, but the data is there. That's what we spent all our time research is doing That's that had to be the priority given our funding So we want we need an API right because we need one to actually pipe this into anything We don't have the capability knowledge etc to do that. We'd love to partner with anyone who can help us with it Okay, that being said we also need to sustain ourselves. We heard again. We heard from Heather We're gonna hear I think even more about the sustainability story. We want this to be open I can't stress that enough, but here's the deal It requires as I mentioned a Constant curation at daily there are four or five attractions a day You have to be entered and investigated and all of that so we can understand them We need to sustain ourselves to be able to continue doing that And if we suddenly just sort of say everybody can sort of use it Well, I'm sorry. That's not a great business model for us at the moment So if anybody would like to help us sustain ourselves funding wise and the open model is definitely what we want Let's talk and sounds like we've got lots of ideas already whether it's a club model with the apologies to Chuck again Whatever it is, but this is what we've created We are we are sure it's already created value because people are using it and because people constantly ask us for the data set Right, which we can also talk about if you'd like that. So that's that's where we are and thank you