Schneider Shorts 3.02.2023 – Where have all retractions gone?

Schneider Shorts of 3 February 2023 – German trachea transplanters forgot to retract 7 papers, a bullying psychologist in Sweden, a colossal wanker with a dodo, ERC thanks an expert, German EiC leaves havoc behind, an EMBO editor has some explaining to do, and finally, how ethics at Cambridge and Oxford University Presses work.

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Science Elites

Where have all retractions gone?

If you miss those charming German trachea transplanters Heike and Thorsten Walles (who in court insisted that Paolo Macchiarini learned his skills from them, and not they from him), well there are some news.

For background, read this most recent article:

That was one retraction, and just for Heike, from the couple’s previous employer, the University of Würzburg. Now the following thing happened at their even older place of work, the Hannover Medical School, abbreviated MHH (where their former boss Macchiarini still holds an adjunct professorship, btw).

Matthias Gaestel, MHH professor and deputy head of the university’s Commission for Good Scientific Practice, posted this on PubPeer, for seven Walles papers:

” This publication was the subject of an investigation by the Commission for Good Scientific Practice (GSP Commission) of Hannover Medical School (MHH). Upon recommendation of the Commission, the MHH President requested the authors to retract this publication in April 2019. As this publication has still not been retracted by January 12, 2023, the MHH President has instructed the Chair of the GSP Commission to publish this commentary.”

It should be mentioned that before she married the surgeon trainee Thorsten, the biologist Heike Walles used to carry the family name of her previous husband, Jürgen Mertsching (who is head of biosafety at MHH).

It’s seven papers in total slotted for retractions which so far didn’t happen. Let’s start with a preclinical paper which soon led to Walleses’ disastrous tracheal patch transplants in Stuttgart (the first one was done with Macchiarini at MHH):

Heike Mertsching , Thorsten Walles , Michael Hofmann , Johanna Schanz , Wolfram H. Knapp Engineering of a vascularized scaffold for artificial tissue and organ generation Biomaterials (2005) doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2005.04.048 

Same gel, different experiments, in one case the gel lane with the right-most band was digitally erased. Here a set of three papers with recycled data:

Klaus Kallenbach , Rainer G. Leyh , Elena Lefik , Thorsten Walles , Matthias Wilhelmi , Serghei Cebotari , Andreas Schmiedl , Axel Haverich , Heike Mertsching Guided tissue regeneration: porcine matrix does not transmit PERV Biomaterials (2004) doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2003.10.040 

Rainer G Leyh , Mathias Wilhelmi , Philip Rebe , Stefan Fischer , Theo Kofidis , Axel Haverich , Heike Mertsching In vivo repopulation of xenogeneic and allogeneic acellular valve matrix conduits in the pulmonary circulation The Annals of Thoracic Surgery (2003) doi: 10.1016/s0003-4975(02)04845-2 

Thorsten Walles , Heidi Görler , Carmen Puschmann , Heike Mertsching Functional neointima characterization of vascular prostheses in human The Annals of Thoracic Surgery (2004) doi: 10.1016/j.athoracsur.2003.08.048 

One of Walleses coauthors there is their former MHH Über-boss, the almighty heart surgeon and entrepreneur Axel Haverich (read below).

Here are three more Walles papers with Haverich to be retracted:

Thorsten Walles , Arthur Lichtenberg , Carmen Puschmann , Rainer Leyh , Mathias Wilhelmi , Klaus Kallenbach , Axel Haverich , Heike Mertsching In vivo model for cross-species porcine endogenous retrovirus transmission using tissue engineered pulmonary arteries European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (2003) doi: 10.1016/s1010-7940(03)00334-8 

Thorsten Walles , Tanja Herden , Axel Haverich , Heike Mertsching Influence of scaffold thickness and scaffold composition on bioartificial graft survival Biomaterials (2003) doi: 10.1016/s0142-9612(02)00490-8 

R.G Leyh , M Wilhelmi , T Walles , K Kallenbach , P Rebe , A Oberbeck , T Herden , A Haverich , H Mertsching Acellularized porcine heart valve scaffolds for heart valve tissue engineering and the risk of cross-species transmission of porcine endogenous retrovirus Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (2003) doi: 10.1016/s0022-5223(03)00353-2 

In November 2021, the publisher Oxford University Press however decided that MHH investigators can piss off with their retraction requests and issued a Corrigendum instead:

“The authors regret, that initially the right to reproduce figures 1a and 1 b was not obtained. This has now been done and the figure legend has been updated accordingly.”

The Editor-in-Chief of European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery is the German surgery professor at the University of Freiburg, Matthias Siepe. He doesn’t answer to my emails. I guess this is how German medical ethics work for trachea transplanters!

I asked the MHH investigator Gaestel for the investigative report or its summary (with 7 retraction requests, there must have been research misconduct findings!). Gaestel announced to check with his commission colleagues.

I also contacted the editors of the affected journals, the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (Fraunhofer IGB) in Stuttgart (responsible for more fake papers and two disastrous tracheal transplants in humans), and Walles’ current employer, the University of Magdeburg (where they are treated like science stars). It is still unclear if Fraunhofer ever did their own investigation as agreed with the MHH and the University of Würzburg, but it becomes rather clear that the Magdeburg leadership knew about the 7 retraction requests since 2019 and never ordered Walleses to comply with them. In fact, when challenged to deny that they wilfully sabotaged those retractions, the Magdeburg leadership remained silent.

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Charming Bully

The Swedish magazine Psykolog reports a bullying scandal at the University of Uppsala:

“Eleven former PhD students in Sweden and England accuse a professor of psychology of having bullied them systematically. The researchers have suffered from stress reactions that have led to vision impairment, sleep disorders, and suicidal thoughts.”

It started in Oxford, UK, where the unnamed psychologist bullied her subordinates: “at least someone in the group was picked on at all times“, “censure and praise was given unpredictably“, people brought to crying in boss’ office.

“When rumour of the toxic work environment started to spread in Oxford, the professor got a new post in Cambridge. New PhD students were recruited. One of them would later inform the leadership of her trying conditions. A decision was made that the PhD student would never again have to meet the professor alone.

The professor kept getting lots of articles published.

Karolinska Institutet got wind of her successes, noted that the professor had Swedish roots and offered a part-time visiting professorship.”

Elva före detta doktorander: “Professorn bröt ned oss” https://t.co/lfKDgVit6O via @psykologtidning

— Psykologtidningen (@Psykologtidning) January 25, 2023

Karolinska “had heard a few rumours of difficulty in co-operation” but recruited the star psychologist anyway.

“There were whispers of the harsh work environment in the professor’s research team at Karolinska Institutet as well. One of the former PhD students – we’ll call her Rebecka – recounts what happened […]

“On the surface, everything is more than great. We were the chosen ones, the elite. But behind our closed doors a darkness filled with punishments and fear welled up.”

The leadership pondered how to handle the situation. A decision was made that one of the PhD students would not have to meet her advisor without supervision. After that, the problem solved itself. The professor announced that she had accepted full-time employment at the university of Uppsala. The management there had not bothered with references, just as at Karolinska Institutet. The university of Uppsala had applied a special provision in the higher education ordinance, which states that a professor of special standing may be recruited without advertising the post.”

In Uppsala, the bullying continued. Someone complained, the faculty sent out an anonymous survey about the work environment which people didn’t dare to answer honestly because they survey wasn’t entirely anonymous after all.

It is extremely easy to find out the real identity of this psychology professor. It’s Emily Holmes, and on her photos she looks like an angel, the nicest person possible. Her institutional page informs us:

“My driving force is improving mental health through science.”

Through bullying, rather. Psykolog published excerpts from victim testimonies, I quote some:

• “I tried to give notice, since I was completely stressed out. I was told that I only thought of myself and lacked empathy. Then she added that the world of research is small, which I perceived as a threat.”
• “Tasks were taken away from me. I did not understand why. I was also told that my name would be removed from an article. When I called this into question – I had worked my fingers to the bone for months – I was told to get out of her room.”
• “I had been working seven days a week for months on end and always carried my computer around to be able to answer questions quickly.”
• “….everything I did was wrong. My name was expunged from an article, and I could not do anything about it. I contemplated suicide and still attend therapy sessions.”
• “At one time it became known that we in the group had talked about one of us being bullied and that this was dreadful. We were all given an earful, since we were supposed to speak to her of any problems, not with each other.“
• “The first week I overheard a researcher being told off through a closed door during a Zoom meeting. Each and every week someone on the research team was the special victim. I got palpitations of the heart because of all the stress.”“

Prof Emily Holmes delivers a keynote @UKPTS on mental imagery & intrusive #memory of #trauma. #UKPTS2016 #psychology pic.twitter.com/rt0hwKd1ph

— Professor Chérie Armour (@ProfArmour) April 12, 2016

Holmes did not reply to my email. She told Psykolog:

“I am deeply sorry to hear that the people you have interviewed felt bad, and feel very saddened to hear this.“

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Lander uncancelled

The Boston Globe went full social justice warrior and took upon themselves to defend the most persecuted minority group ever, which are of course the wealthy heterosexual white males.

There are now two articles in defence of unjustly cancelled victims of the woke mob harassment: the sexual harasser and research cheater David Sabatini (sacked by MIT) and the multi-millionaire geneticist Eric Lander, who a year ago was dismissed as President Biden’s freshly appointed science czar over massive bullying (read here).

This was the teary Sabatini article, and this one, also by Boston Globe, laments about Lander:

“Politico published an article reporting complaints that Lander was sexist, had bullied staffers, and had created a toxic culture. Lander instantly resigned. He apologized to Biden for unintentionally “being disrespectful and demeaning” to some colleagues, and wrote, “I will take this lesson forward.”

That apology seemed to help fuel a public shaming. The American Association for the Advancement of Science immediately disinvited Lander from speaking at its annual conference, issuing a statement that his reported conduct was not “befitting a scientist or scientific leader.” Top journals like Science and Nature referred to him as “disgraced,” part of a media pile-on that cast him as “a brilliant jerk.” In Scientific American, Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes said Lander made her think of the killer Raskolnikov from “Crime and Punishment.”

In the aftermath, Lander, long a leading voice on science issues, fell publicly silent. But now that his two years of leave from the Broad have ended, he will return to his tenured faculty position at the institute, though not as director.”

Worth noting that the internal WH investigation into Lander ended in December, but he didn't resign then.

Only after people leaked the investigation results to me did it get the WH to respond this way. https://t.co/Ped4LTfPb4

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) February 8, 2022

Now, nobody is sadder than me when a rich white professorial wanker is punished for doing what he thought was his sacred privilege as an entitled genius: abusing his property, erm, his lab members in every way he feels like.

But I find it funny that Lander now returns to Broad Institute to work as a humble PI. First, he doesn’t need the money, Lander is very rich, $45.5 million. And didn’t he have a successful business?

Together with a certain cancer cheater from MD Anderson, Raghu Kalluri, Lander once founded a multi-million heavy biotech company named Codiak Biosciences. Its founding technology is based on Sonia Melo’s fraudulent data and other phony trash from Kalluri’s lab.

Maybe Lander failed as a biotech entrepreneur, or maybe he misses bullying people, otherwise why is he crawling back to Broad while demoted?

And as for Sabatini, well, there is this from his billionaire patron:

I am pleased to announce that last night at @PershingSqFdn scientific advisors dinner, we announced that we found a 50% funding partner for the new Sabatini lab.The new lab now has $5m of funding per year for five years. David is now making launch preparations for the lab. Allez!

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) February 2, 2023

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ERC Experts

On 12 December 2022, the President of the European Research Council (ERC) Maria Leptin thanked a panel member in a letter:

“Dear Professor Chamkha.

On behalf of the European Research Council, we would like to thank you for having served as panel member of the ERC Starting Grant Call 2022. […] We appreciate your dedication, your hard work and resilience in this particular context.

Your contribution to the evaluation and review process is invaluable to the ERC’s continuing effort to support frontier research in Europe on the sole basis of scientific quality. We also want to thank you for the written feedback (panel recommendations) after the evaluation process. […]

Again, we want to thank you for all your efforts, and we look forward to working with you again in the future.”

So far, so boring. The exciting bit is what kind of scholar this Ali Chamkha is. He is an engineering professor in Kuwait and he used to be a “highly cited researcher” on Clarivate. Until he was removed for citation rigging.

Alexander Magazinov previously wrote about him on For Better Science.

Magazinov now wrote to the ERC:

“Please allow me to explain a circumstance that, in my opinion, disqualifies him from such a service.

In 2020, I reported to Wiley a “special issue” in one of their journals, Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences. See the archived call for papers for this “special issue” here:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/10991476/MMA_Nanotube_SIv2-1573490169037.pdf

The “special issue” in question was co-“guest-edited” by Chamkha.

A number of concerns were raised, including doubts over the scientific quality of accepted papers, and, more importantly, recurring authors and questionable citation practices.

As a result of these concerns, the “special issue” has been put on hold, and seemingly remains so for over 2 years. As of now, the papers purportedly from that “special issue” remain “online first” without being assigned to a journal volume (although Wiley does not communicate on their findings, if any).

Please, refer to the following spreadsheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bKCUsvKqTGJ554yuk8OiidNCbYNwyAGzt28odFBnftQ/edit?usp=sharing

Wiley communicated that 94 papers have been accepted to the “special issue” in question, yet only a partial list is undoubtedly confirmed (“Reason for inclusion” = “C8” or “JM list”). The rest is inferred from other features of the papers, but to me, as I am familiar with the overall content of the journal, these features are quite convincing.

To the main point: the “special issue” in question contributed the following payloads of citations to a selection of researchers…”

Chamkha got from that special issue 348 citations to himself. And many other citations went to known papermillers and citation scammers.

حصاد 2022 العلمي:
أنا فخور جدًا وسعيد لتلقي 9648 اقتباسًا جديدًا في عام 2022. زاد إجمالي الإستشهادات الخاصة بي إلى 44223 ، وارتفع مؤشر هيرش الخاص بي إلى 118 وارتفع مؤشر i10 الخاص بي إلى 760. أصبح هذا الإنجاز ممكنًا من خلال العمل الجاد المستمر والتفاني وولاء وتعاون الباحثين pic.twitter.com/pdelZ5t0fx

— Ali J. Chamkha (@achamkha) December 31, 2022

The ERC anti-fraud team informed Magazinov:

“We have transferred your email to our colleagues of the Integrity Standing Committee, which is dealing with information and allegations concerning scientific misconduct and other breaches of research integrity.“

Good. But I have questions. Specifically, why is Jesper Svejstrup still a member of the ERC Standing Committee? Not just that, he is ERC’s Vice-President for Life Sciences.

I very much look forward to serving as the new vice-president for Life Sciences of the ERC, a fantastic organisation, which has transformed European science. https://t.co/g5SUhj9yPJ

— Jesper Svejstrup Laboratory (@SvejstrupLab) October 28, 2022

Now, the University of Copenhagen professor Svejstrup (who recently returned to Denmark from UK) is the former boss of Maria Fousteri, and together they published a paper which Fousteri’s former employer Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) found to be fraudulent and requested its retraction. In 2015. Next to 3 more Fousteri papers, two of which were retracted only last year.

The corresponding author Svejstrup however successfully prevented the retraction of his paper till this day. Also, Fousteri was allowed to use up her freshly awarded €1.5 million ERC grant till the last penny. ERC did not mind at all, and for three years knowingly watched the money being burned on fake science. As reminder, Svejstrup was member of the ERC research integrity commission already back then.

This is the paper, number 3 in the investigative report, for which LUMC decided:

“In two other publications the manipulations were less numerous (3,4), but still of a nature that the Committee believes retraction is in order. However, since these publications did not originate from the LUMC, which only provided part of the experiments, the Committee advises further action to be taken by the institutes in the United Kingdom, where the main responsibility for these publication lies.”

Roy Anindya , Pierre-Olivier Mari , Ulrik Kristensen , Hanneke Kool , Giuseppina Giglia-Mari , Leon H. Mullenders , Maria Fousteri , Wim Vermeulen , Jean-Marc Egly , Jesper Q. Svejstrup A ubiquitin-binding domain in Cockayne syndrome B required for transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair Molecular Cell (2010) doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2010.04.017 

That Molecular Cell paper must be even faker than described. It’s not just because of Fousteri: Svejstrup’s French collaborator on it is Jean-Marc Egly from University of Strasbourg, whose lab published lots of fraud.

Svejstrup (and Alan Lehmann, the UK researcher behind paper Nr 4) were “urged to further investigate and to take appropriate action concerning the publications” by Fousteri. They chose to do nothing, encouraged by their universities and the editorial crooks behind Molecular Cell and Cell Press.

But who are we to meddle? Svejstrup is Europe’s top research integrity expert, right? And now he is in charge of all biomedical grants at ERC.

Hahaha. ERC learned nothing from their embarrassing pratfall three years ago with their genius choice of President, Mauro Ferrari. I did warn them, they didn’t listen.

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Fully exonerated of any wrongdoing

On the occasion of our recent reporting of some fraud at University College Dublin (UCD), Clare Francis recalled in the comment section an older case, at a different Irish university.

Retraction Watch published in 2015 an investigative report by the Maynooth University :

“During the detailed investigation, the student admitted to the falsification and misrepresentation of some research data included in her PhD thesis and in the journal publications.

Maynooth University takes an extremely serious view of issues of this nature and has decided to revoke the PhD degree awarded to Aisha Qasim Butt. This is necessary as the PhD thesis of Aisha Qasim Butt is no longer sufficient to support the award of PhD. […]

It found that the senior staff member who initially reported the matter, Dr Sinéad Miggin, and the two other researchers, Dr Suaad Ahmed and Dr Ashwini Maratha, were in no way complicit with the actions of Ms. Butt and thus have been fully exonerated of any wrongdoing. The University would like to thank them for their co-operation in the investigation and their professional forbearance during this very difficult time.”

Two papers by the evil Butt were retracted, the little fraudster lost her PhD degree, and the case closed. All thanks to the heroic Dr Sinead Miggin, who told Retraction Watch:

“…my former PhD student, Aisha Qasim Butt, admitted to the falsification and misrepresentation of some research data included in her PhD thesis and in the journal publications. The investigation found that Dr Suaad Ahmed, Dr Ashwini Maratha and I were in no way complicit with the actions of Ms. Butt and thus we have been fully exonerated of any wrongdoing. This has been a tremendously difficult time for me and I would like to thank all those who have supported me during this period. Given that I withdrew the papers appropriately and have fully cooperated and been exonerated after a year-long investigation I now consider the matter concluded.”

You know where this is going, right?

Miggin is namely the mentee of the infamous UCD’s cheater Therese Kinsella. And the fake science they published together happened long was before Miggin had her own lab for Butt to joined for PhD to.

Two papers by Miggin and Kinsella were retracted, one fixed with a correction:

 

Miggin has 8 papers on PubPeer. Not all coauthored by Butt or Kinsella. How about this one, with Miggin as first author and the Trinity College Dublin professor Luke O’Neill (who has over 20 papers on PubPeer!), allegedly fixed with a Correction in 2013?

Sinead M. Miggin , Eva Pålsson-McDermott , Aisling Dunne , Caroline Jefferies , Emmanuel Pinteaux , Kathy Banahan , Caroline Murphy , Paul Moynagh , Masahiro Yamamoto , Shizuo Akira , Nancy Rothwell , Douglas Golenbock , Katherine A. Fitzgerald , Luke A. J. O’Neill NF-kappaB activation by the Toll-IL-1 receptor domain protein MyD88 adapter-like is regulated by caspase-1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2007) doi: 10.1073/pnas.0608100104

“The authors note that Fig. 3 appeared incorrectly. Panel B (Top) depicting the time course of NF-κB activation in wild type and caspase-1 deficient peritoneal macrophages is not the same version as the authors submitted originally to PNAS. A correct version including vertical rules to indicate splicing is shown below. Regarding panel C, during the preparation of the manuscript, we inadvertently repeated a set of p38 blots corresponding to p-p38 Western blots. The correct p38 Western blots are shown below. The findings of the paper have not been affected by the error and the authors apologize to the editors and readers.”

Obviously everyone in Ireland knows Miggin is a very bad scientist. That’s probably why she remains in the junior rank of Assistant Professor since 2006. If only Miggin was male, she would be a full professor and carrier of honours, awards and academy memberships like O’Neill and nobody could touch her.

But I do wonder: what really happened with Butt? What if her real crime was to protest about the fake data her advisor forced her to introduce into her paper and thesis? In any case, maybe Maynooth University should not allow Miggin to train students.

Want to find out more about postgrad opportunities and our MSc in Immunology and Global Health…drop by and chat to @MUHost_Path
and @SineadMiggin
4-8pm tomorrow MU library https://t.co/MrnaolQt6C

— Sinead Miggin (@SineadMiggin) March 9, 2020

Speaking of Kinsella: this zombie professor of UCD seems to work full-time for her own successful biotech startup ATXA Therapeutics. Successful in the sense that it gets millions of Euros of public funding, despite the CEO’s fraud record and 6 retractions. Just in October 2022, ATXA was given €10,5 million by the European Innovation Council. This follows €2.5 million ATXA received from Horizon 2020 in 2018. Because Kinsella says she invented a cure for pulmonary hypertension.

@ATXA_Ireland is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company committed to providing innovative, life-changing treatments for certain cardiopulmonary diseases.

ATXA is set to receive €10.5M in grant and equity financing through the @EUeic Accelerator programme. #i2i #idea2impact pic.twitter.com/x3IoYIDSGt

— EITi2iEU (@EiTi2i) January 23, 2023

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Scholarly Publishing

Sauer stops

Remember Prof Dr Dirk Uwe Sauer of RWTH Aachen, the Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Journal of Energy Storage? Which Iranian fraudsters discovered to be a welcoming home for their purchased papermill manuscripts and citation scams?

As Sauer informed me, he would have loved to crack down on the fraud, but was unfortunately too busy. Maybe this is why he tasked his department’s junior group leader Weihan Li with running yet another special issue, assisted by France-based peddler of “tortured phrases” (aka plagiarism), Mostafa Safdari Shadloo (read here).

Other papermill garbage kept entering via the “normal” editorial procedure, outside of special issues. Like this Chinese papermill turd, co-authored by a russian pig sty expert (sic!):

Daifen Chen , Yanlong Zhu , Shuo Han , Lysyakov Anatoly , Makeey Andrey , Liu Lu Investigate the effect of a parallel-cylindrical flow field on the solid oxide fuel cell stack performance by 3D multiphysics simulating Journal of Energy Storage (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.est.2022.106587

More recently, Sauer dropped all pretences and invited one of the most infamous papermillers and citation scammers, Davood Toghraie. This was published on 16 January 2023:

Jian Wu , Mohammad Derikvand , Duaa Abdul Rida Musa , Zainab Ali Bu Sinnah , Farag M.A. Altalbawy , Sabah Auda AbdulAmeer , Davood Toghraie , Ammar I. Alsabery , Ibrahem Waleed Thermal performance improvement of a heat-sink using metal foams for better energy storage systems Journal of Energy Storage (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.est.2023.106663

Of course Sauer also allowed citation stacking to celebrate a certain YM Chu and a certain Y. Tang, published on 20 January 2023:

Shao-Wen Yao , Mohammed N. Ajour , Nidal H. Abu-Hamdeh, Abd Elmotaleb A.M.A. Elamin Freezing process of nanomaterial inside thermal storage tank with amelioration in geometry utilizing Galerkin modeling Journal of Energy Storage (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.est.2023.106653 

While on his celebrity trip, Sauer let the legendary Rafael Luque to place his papermilled turd into the journal, joined by Awais Ahmad and other crooks. Published on 11 January 2023:

Iqra Ashraf , Qasim Abbas , Yaqin Huang , Najam Ul Hassan , Munirah D. Albaqami , Ammar Mohamed Tighezza , Sayed M. Eldin , Muhammad Sufyan Javed , Awais Ahmad , Rafael Luque V-Mn-O aerogel composite-based high-energy Zn-ion hybrid supercapacitor Journal of Energy Storage (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.est.2022.106601

One wonders why Sauer was allowing this to happen. Pigheadedness? Revenge, maybe? The metaphorical equivalent of crapping on your successor’s desk before leaving the job?

Because some days ago, Sauer was replaced as Editor-in-Chief, suddenly and without any announcements by the journal. Sauer chose not to comment on his departure into the status of “founding editor”, but I asked the RWTH Ombudsman to investigate his editorial activities vis-a-vis papermills. Sauer is indeed a busy man: people have to pay to listen to him (even online!) as if he was a rock star. Almost €130 per ticket, and this in Thailand. Our German professor may be a bad editor, but he certainly knows all about money.

[TGGS Seminar] eFuel, Hydrogen or Batteries – Which Technology for Different Mobility Application ?

Speaker by Univ.-Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dirk Uwe Sauer, @RWTH

For more information about this seminar
➡➡ https://t.co/TO1JFZSXES

FYI, #TGGS ➡➡ https://t.co/xcSJvPDIGu pic.twitter.com/6xF04Y3DhE

— TGGS_KMUTNB (@TggsBangkok) January 25, 2023

The new Editor in Chief of Journal of Energy Storage is Luisa F. Cabeza, professor at the University of Lleida in Spain. Last year, her past and current mentees to organise an MDPI special issue titled “A Themed Issue Dedicated to Professor Luisa F. Cabeza”. It had only 3 papers, all their own. At least no papermill trash.

Prof. @luisafcabeza, @greiaudl @UdL_RDI, became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Energy Storage, @ElsevierEnergy pic.twitter.com/gUcqWHk1XF

— GREiA (@greiaudl) January 12, 2023

I wonder: does Sauer use papermill “science” while educating the public and advising the German government on battery technology and green energy? Maybe he does? What then?

30 Minuten geballtes Wissen zu den Themen #Strom, #Wärme und #Treibstoff gibt es in der #Keynote von Prof. Dr. Uwe Sauer am 28.10. um 18:35 Uhr im Libeskind-Auditorium der @leuphana. Jetzt anmelden und dabei sein 👉 https://t.co/pxLQPzNEiR #LCOY #COP27 #DeinKlimaDeineMeinung pic.twitter.com/fr9PquuKLa

— LCOY Germany (@lcoygermany) October 12, 2022

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Conflict of Interests

EMBO Reports is one of the journals owned by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), a prestigious learned society with its administrative and editorial office in Heidelberg, Germany.

A paper in EMBO Reports, from the Dulbecco Telethon Institute in Naples, Italy, has been flagged on PubPeer in 2020, and Elisabeth Bik added another finding a few days ago.

Achim Breiling, Laura P O’Neill , Donatella D’Eliseo , Bryan M Turner, Valerio Orlando Epigenome changes in active and inactive Polycomb‐group‐controlled regions EMBO reports (2004) doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400260

Bik had a look at the journal’s editorial board and noted:

“Of additional note, the first author is Senior Scientific Editor of Embo Reports, in which this paper has been published. I hope this will not affect the investigation of these concerns.”

In fact, Achim Breiling and his postdoctoral mentor Valerio Orlando (EMBO member since 2006 and now professor at King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia), have another paper on PubPeer. Flagged by Bik already in 2020:

Orlando is not an angel. He collaborated with the most toxic cheaters. Like here, with Kristian Helin and his mentee Diego Pasini, back when Helin was running a lab at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan, 1995-2007. Orlando worked between 1998 and 2002 at San Raffaele Institute in the same Italian city.

Here an example of this collaboration:

Lovorka Stojic , Zuzana Jasencakova , Carolina Prezioso , Alexandra Stützer , Beatrice Bodega , Diego Pasini , Rebecca Klingberg , Chiara Mozzetta , Raphael Margueron , Pier Lorenzo Puri , Dirk Schwarzer , Kristian Helin , Wolfgang Fischle , Valerio Orlando Chromatin regulated interchange between polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2)-Ezh2 and PRC2-Ezh1 complexes controls myogenin activation in skeletal muscle cells Epigenetics & Chromatin (2011) doi: 10.1186/1756-8935-4-16

That gel is completely fake. Helin is now directing the ICR London fraud factory, they couldn’t have found a more suitable president. The first author Lovorka Stojic is also in London, running her own lab at the fraud-infested Barts Cancer Institute of the Queen Mary University.

And look with whom Orlando and his mentee Stojic teamed up in the Neapolitan neighbourhood: Italy’s most infamous research fraudster Alfredo Fusco!

Eleonora Borbone , Giancarlo Troncone , Angelo Ferraro , Zuzana Jasencakova , Lovorka Stojic , Francesco Esposito , Nadine Hornig , Alfredo Fusco , Valerio Orlando Enhancer of zeste homolog 2 overexpression has a role in the development of anaplastic thyroid carcinomas The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (2011) doi: 10.1210/jc.2010-1784

Now, everyone can end up in a rotten research group. But the German postdoc Breiling arrived to Orlando’s San Raffaele lab in 1998, and three years later followed his boss to Naples where he stayed until 2007, until Orlando moved to Rome. It doesn’t look like they fought over research practices. Breiling then worked for 9 years at DKFZ in Heidelberg and then became senior editor at EMBO Reports. Where he was so busy that he found no time to fix his own paper there, so I reinforced the EMBO Head of Publications Bernd Pulverer, who promised to investigate. I predict that the EMBO Press-typical “partial retraction” will now happen.

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No further action

Papermill hunter Nick Wise reported this on PubPeer:

Afshin Ardebili , Ahmad Latifian , Chya Fatah Aziz , Rima H. BinSaeed , S. M. Alizadeh , Evgeniy V. Kostyrin A comprehensive and systematic literature review on the employee attendance management systems based on cloud computing Journal of Management & Organization (2022) doi: 10.1017/jmo.2022.63 

Wise also noted that several sentences in the paper’s abstract were “identical or very similar to the advert above“. One author, S.M Alizadeh, has a PubPeer record of papermilling with known fraudsters Davood Toghraie and Afshin Davarpanah. Wise also wondered how the “authors”, each one of them located in a different country (Malaysia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and russia) came to collaborate. One of the authors papermill customers, Ahmad Latifian, explained:

“Through Researchgate and Linkedin, scientific &research communication and consensus and collaboration was established.“

Well, Wise didn’t really wonder, you can’t have more proof for a cheap papermill origin than this.

He informed the publisher in September 2022. On 30 January 2023, he received this expert assessment from Jamie Davidson, Associate Publisher for Business & Management and Law Journals at Cambridge University Press:

“Thank you for bringing the Facebook advertisement to our attention. While we acknowledge the advert looks suspicious, the journal’s investigation into this publication has not found sufficient evidence to confirm that the article is part of a paper mill. No further action will be taken at this time; however, the journal will be monitoring the situation and will take editorial action should new information become available, or if further suspicious activity is found.””

Cambridge University Press rightly decided that papermill money doesn’t stink.

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This careless error

From Cambridge University Press to Oxford University Press. Look what just got corrected.

Bidyut Purkait , Ruby Singh , Kirti Wasnik , Sushmita Das , Ashish Kumar , Mark Paine , Manas Dikhit , Dharmendra Singh , Abul H. Sardar , Ayan K. Ghosh , Pradeep Das Up-regulation of silent information regulator 2 (Sir2) is associated with amphotericin B resistance in clinical isolates of Leishmania donovani Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (2015) doi: 10.1093/jac/dku534 

All that was flagged by Elisabeth Bik a year ago, In January 2022. And here comes the Correction from 23 January 2023:

“The authors and JAC are grateful to Dr Elisabeth Bik who raised the possibility of image manipulation in figure 6c in the article Up-regulation of silent information regulator 2 (Sir2) is associated with amphotericin B resistance in clinical isolates of Leishmania donovani (Purkait et al., 2015). The authors apologise to the readers of the Journal for making this careless error in compiling the composite figure. The authors have resupplied a new part C to figure 6 entitled FITC-A LdSir2–/+ S + AmB to replace the original part and this is published below to correct the scientific record.”

That’s it. The authors openly admit they faked the flow cytometry in Figure 6, pretend the evidence for massive forgery in other figures wasn’t there, and the journal editors, the publishers Oxford Academic and the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy accept it.

The scientific record stands corrected.

Wow.
Authors appear to admit to image manipulation of flow cytometry images, but @OUPAcademic's Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy issued a correction.
Even worse, several manipulations are still present in the corrected figure. https://t.co/BFXH9b4gY8 pic.twitter.com/iQigdIH2MW

— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) January 30, 2023

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News in Tweets

• Peter Wilmshurst, Susan Bewley and Patricia Murray with a letter to editor regarding Robbins et al 2021: “We raise concerns about the article by Robbins et al describing hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for the treatment of long COVID.¹ […] We believe it is unacceptable that this experimental non-comparative efficacy trial had ethics approval only for the data analysis. It did not have ethics approval for the exposure of patients to the unproven use of HBOT in a clinical trial. […] The trial was not blinded for either patients or the treating doctor, who performed the assessment in the private facility. Whether the research was funded by the subjects paying for ‘private treatment’ is not stated. […] We believe that Clinical Medicine should publish an expression of concern about this paper whilst the journal investigates whether there was ethical approval for the actual research and not just the analysis. If there was not, the article should be retracted.“

Peter Wilmshurst, @susan_bewley and I raise concerns about a study reporting on the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for long COVID: https://t.co/VTT540miDp

— Patricia Murray (@PMurray_65) January 30, 2023

• Paul Knoepfler blogs “on the Bryan Johnson anti-aging extravaganza” (endorsed by George Church!) and Johnson’s private doc Oliver Zolman: “The Bloomberg piece, entitled “How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year” seems to lurch from almost fanboy-like admiration to cautionary statements about some of the things Johnson is doing. The title also wrongly implies Johnson has been able to become like an 18-year-old again.“

Skepticism on the Bryan Johnson anti-aging spectaclehttps://t.co/kwesSdK0vF @CaulfieldTim @bryan_johnson #stemcells

— Paul Knoepfler (@pknoepfler) January 31, 2023

• Colossal wanker from MIT, George Church, who previously successfully announced to use gene technology to de-extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, thylacines, and now he and his company Colossal announced to de-extict a Dodo. Guardian loves it: “Ben Lamm, the co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the company – whose attempts on mammoths and thylacine have not yet produced new animals – was raising a further $150m (£122m) from investors to pursue its research on the dodo.”

Sigh. Cloning a dodo is absurd. Here's a couple of tweets about why:

1. The idea of editing a pigeon's genome until it "becomes a #dodo" is as ridiculous as it sounds. The odds of success are so vanishingly tiny that it's incredible anyone is funding it.https://t.co/vYh6hjxHCL

— Jack Ashby (@JackDAshby) January 31, 2023

• An older investigation by Charles Seife from 2015: “Fifty-seven published clinical trials were identified for which an FDA inspection of a trial site had found significant evidence of 1 or more of the following problems: falsification or submission of false information, 22 trials (39%); problems with adverse events reporting, 14 trials (25%); protocol violations, 42 trials (74%); inadequate or inaccurate recordkeeping, 35 trials (61%); failure to protect the safety of patients and/or issues with oversight or informed consent, 30 trials (53%); and violations not otherwise categorized, 20 trials (35%). Only 3 of the 78 publications (4%) that resulted from trials in which the FDA found significant violations mentioned the objectionable conditions or practices found during the inspection. No corrections, retractions, expressions of concern, or other comments acknowledging the key issues identified by the inspection were subsequently published.“

"A researcher was caught falsifying documents… [those] led to the death of a patient… Although this episode is described in detail in FDA documents, none of the publications have any mention of the falsification, fraud, or HOMICIDE."https://t.co/DQrz9nooPb

— James Heathers @jamesheathers@techhub.social (@jamesheathers) February 1, 2023

• A thread by Elisabeth Bik about a very fake paper in PNAS, Qiang et al 2014 (see on PubPeer): “This paper was cited 184 times, and funded by @NIH, @AmericanCancer, @UChicago Cancer Research Center, and UChicago Friends of Dermatology Endowment Fund. All problems found by eye.“

Figure 5B and 5E show different experiments, but they appear to share the same GAPDH blot. And Figure 5E's HA and Myc blots appear to show repeats. pic.twitter.com/8eaaMl7vTs

— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) February 2, 2023

• Gongxian Wang, author of Huang et al 2020: “we believe that the authors of paper entitled “LncRNA IGFBP4-1 promotes tumor development by activating Janus kinase-signal transducer and activator of transcription pathway in bladder urothelial carcinoma” plagiarized our manuscript submitted to Frontiers in Oncology. Therefore, we ask the authors to apologize and withdraw the manuscript, and appeal to Frontiers in Oncology to start a survey on this plagiarism.”

Whoops, a glitch at the Science Factory. Papermill sells two copies of the same paper to different authors.https://t.co/44hqe4HwIrhttps://t.co/p9w2s1zebN

(tbf the timing does leave room for one to be plagiarised from the other). pic.twitter.com/G12j9QM1Nz

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) January 27, 2023

• Dina Ali Yaseen, “author” of Bhagat et al J Cleaner Production 2023: “Hello, The several tortured phrases were used to avoid plagiarism.“

Author: “tortured phrases were used to avoid plagiarism.” Maybe to avoid plagiarism detection… hmm?https://t.co/ME97sfewpg pic.twitter.com/qWkeyr4W8U

— Cheshire (@Thatsregrettab1) January 31, 2023

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