Over the last month or so Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads has become a must-read weekly newsletter. Not just the usual slate of links to stonkingly huge retractions but also tales of academic embezzlement, an article in The Economist on the systemic problems in Chinese science and academic publishing, ghost-management of the entire process of bringing a drug to market, news of quiet Elsevier acquisitions, and how Northwestern Polytechnic University in Silicon Valley became a corrupt test-faking visa-factory. That’s just a small sample from this week’s edition. There’s also optimism-inducing stuff, like this week’s news of Google’s new ‘Science Journal’ phone app which turns your phone into a citizen-science research lab.