Latest Posts
Plan S in chaos at Berlin APE conference
Plan S, designed by the former EU Commissioner Robert-Jan Smits, became a complete and chaotic mess where everyone, including the members of the signatory cOAlition S of research founders, does whatever they want. I learned all that while participating at the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) conference in Berlin, on 15-16 January.
Texas Photoshop Massacre (in Nature)
The team around the paediatric oncologist Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, discovered a way to engineer T-leukocytes to bypass the blood-brain barrier at attack otherwise untreatable brain cancers. Their amazing technology to get this published in Nature was brazenly insolent data fakery.
Scratchy cancer cure discoveries of Ruben Plentz
Professor Ruben Plentz chose to focus his career on clinical medicine in Bremen, despite his tremendous academic achievements in cancer research. Was it because malicious critics harassed him with frivolous investigations and corrections, envious at all those peer-reviewed cancer cures the great doctor invented?
Ferrara rector Zauli unleashes Italian authorities to protect his phony privacy
On 27 December 2018, I received an email from the Italian Office for Protection of Personal Data. A certain Professor Giorgio Zauli has reported me for publishing an official letter his University of Ferrara sent to me on his behalf.
Ariel Rector Zinigrad and his elusive qualifications
Ariel University is a settlers’ university, located outside of legal Israel borders. What Ariel lacks in academic performance or even official recognition, it makes up in support from right-wing politicians. This post addresses the scientific qualifications of Ariel’s rector Michael Zinigrad. Or the pretence thereof.
Frontiers: a danger for public health?
Frontiers is a somewhat unconventional open access publisher, which likes to have it both ways: playing scientific elite while accepting almost anything from paying customers. My regular contributor Smut Clyde will tell you below how some anti-vaccine scare-mongers managed to sneak in some rather dangerous works thanks to Frontiers’ unofficial “we don’t judge, we just charge” quasi-policy.
Lopez-Otin and Daley retract Nature Cell Biology paper
The 2015 Nature Cell Biology paper by the Spanish cancer researcher Carlos Lopez-Otin and his US partner George Q Daley, stem cell titan and dean of Harvard Medical School, is being retracted. First author and Lopez-Otin’s student Clara Soria-Valles caused Daley even more trouble: her next groundbreaking paper was meant to be already published, but it is not even submitted and might never be.
Linköping investigation: Tiwari trips over Sharma’s fraud
The last act of the Ashutosh Tiwari travesty at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden took place. Tiwari, the fake professor and master of predatory conferences, tripped only over his vanity of gift co-authorship on 3 papers by his Allahabad mate Prashant Sharma, a shameless nanotechnology data faker with presently 26 retractions.
Swedish Prosecution Authority reopens Macchiarini manslaughter investigation
A decision was announced by the Swedish Prosecution Authority in Gothenburg on the Paolo Macchiarini case today. The issue are plastic trachea transplants the scandal surgeon performed at the hospital of the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. The earlier decision by state prosecutor was changed in part and the preliminary investigation will be reopened
Western blot loading control libraries and beyond
Too many scientists defend the practice of not probing for loading controls for each protein gel. They say a “library” method perfectly suffices, when one separate loading control gel is run once for reference. Such sloppiness can sometimes be a hint of even worse practices taking place.
