Schneider Shorts of 7 April 2023 – Spanish King of Papermillers sacked, a bully ecologist in Yale, how to give healthy people cancer, with a stem cell cure approved in Germany, publishers’ different approaches to research integrity, and what to do about another journal blacklist.
Table of Discontent
Science Elites
- Shot themselves in the foot – papermiller Rafael Luque kicked out in Cordoba
- Yale Bully – Michael Balter’s revelations about ecologist Walter Jetz
Scholarly Publishing
- Carefully reviewed and resolved – ACS editor weighs in on research integrity
- Valid and correct – Wiley educates me about Chinese papermills
- The information is now correct – Elsevier approves of Iranian papermills
- Warning about a Suspicious Website – MDPI and Frontiers announce to sue Predatory Reports
Industry Giants
- Holy Grail – Ashish Tripathi’s very big stem cell business with cancer
- A German cure – TICEBA’s silly cell therapy won national approval
News in Tweets
Science Elites
Shot themselves in the foot
Amazing news: Rafael Luque, the King of Papermillers, has been sacked by his University of Cordoba in Spain. Just days before he told me that he left voluntarily:
“I am no longer an employee of UCO since January 2023 (despite the efforts from my new Rector to try to keep me). Exciting times!“
The Highly Cited Researchers of Clarivate
“here is my advice to Clarivate: better get lost. ” – Alexander Magazinov
El Pais reported on 31 March 2023 (Google-translated):
“One of the most cited scientists in the world, the Spanish chemist Rafael Luque , has been suspended from employment and salary for the next 13 years, as confirmed to EL PAÍS by the affected person himself and his institution, the University of Córdoba. The body has sanctioned Luque for signing his studies as a researcher at other exotic centers, such as the King Saud University, in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), and the Russian Friendship of Peoples University , in Moscow, despite having a research contract as full-time civil servant with the Spanish institution.
Luque, born in Córdoba 44 years ago, is one of the most productive scientists in Spain. He has published about 700 studies , mostly in the field of so-called green chemistry, which attempts to synthesize products, such as drugs and fuels, while generating less waste. In the three months of 2023, Luque has already signed 58 studies, one every 37 hours. The chemist has been on the list of most cited researchers in the world , compiled by the specialized company Clarivate.”
Luque himself was quoted:
““Without me, the University of Córdoba will drop 300 positions. They shot themselves in the foot”, affirms Luque, who attributes the sanction to “pure envy”.” [….] Luque assures that he has never paid to sign in a foreign study, but adds that he does not know all the Iranian co-authors and does not rule out that some of them did pay to appear.”
The sleuths who exposed Luque’s papermilling, Nick Wise and Alexander Magazinov, are credited. And we learn that Luque is certainly not ashamed by his papermilling:
“Luque does not stop publishing studies, he goes faster and faster. Last year he signed about 110. In the first quarter of 2023, he already has 58. The chemist acknowledges that since December he has been using the ChatGPT artificial intelligence program to “polish” his texts . “These months have been quite productive, because there are items that I used to need two or three days for and now I do them in one day,” he points out.”
You will be paid US $500-800 for each paper
“Or The author can also put your name to the article to increase your academic popularity, such as adding your name to the second or third author.”
There were problems before:
“However, it is not the first time that he has been involved in a scandal. Two professors from the University of La Laguna, José Juan Marrero and David Díaz , denounced in 2011 that one of his students appropriated data from his laboratory and published it on his behalf, with Rafael Luque as sole co-author. A court in La Laguna sentenced Luque and the former student last year for committing a crime against intellectual property, as the Cordovan chemist admits: “I helped him review the article, put it in good English and publish it, yes. I have appealed the sentence.””
My personal view s that Luque wasn’t sacked for research misconduct, or at least this wasn’t the real reason. Maybe he just didn’t share.
It is not clear if Luque’s papermilling mentee Awais Ahmad (over 30 papers on PubPeer) remains in Cordoba. Most likely he had to leave with Luque.
Yale Bully
The independent science journalist Michael Balter reports another case of bullying in academia:
“This past February, I was contacted by a former postdoctoral researcher at Yale’s laboratory of Global Biodiversity, Ecology & Conservation, led by ecologist and evolutionary biologist Walter Jetz. The lab, which is largely funded by the E.O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation and inspired by Wilson’s influential yet often controversial conception of these issues, has for many years been a magnet for young researchers in these fields. It has been under Jetz’s direction since 2016. Jetz, who is German but has spent most of his career elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, has also been scientific chair of the Wilson foundation since 2018. Many young scientists have come into the lab full of excitement about the research they might be able to do there; but as I was to learn, in many cases those hopes soon turned sour, due to a combination of bullying, micro-management, and alleged unethical conduct by Jetz, all in the context of a toxic lab atmosphere that drove many young researchers to leave earlier than they had intended.”
How postdocs were treated in this elite lab:
“Instead, in nearly every meeting, Jetz would lay out “a list of tasks to be done” and then, in following meetings, demand a detailed accounting of what had been accomplished. This researcher and others told me that “there was a lot of yelling” by Jetz not only at the lab meetings, but also in individual meetings.”
Jetz also used his power position to outright steal the work of his peers:
“Early on, Jetz had gained a reputation in the biodiversity community for using the data of other scientists without permission.”
Another issue was the fact that the famous evolutionary theorist E. O. Wilson was exposed as a racist after his death, as Balter reminds:
“Wilson was an enthusiastic supporter of the late scientific racist J. Philippe Rushton, whose ideas about race and intelligence had long been notorious. I wrote about this episode myself in this newsletter a little over a year ago.”
Satoshi Kanazawa and other racist “Galileos”
Outright racism and misogyny became rare in academia, eugenics and bigotry lurk these days not in Mankind Quarterly but in respected journals, wrapped in fancy genetics and neuroscience. Meet one of the last of the old school racist IQ psychologists, Satoshi Kanazawa.
Being a white German man, Jetz was obviously the most qualified expert on racism. So he educated his postdocs what to think of the evidence of Wilson’s racism:
“Jetz sent the entire lab a series of emails “that got progressively unhinged,” as one postdoc put it, describing the accusations as “fringe or extreme views.””
Yale received the complaints from Jetz’ postdocs, ordered him to take some coaching lessons, and that was it.
“At the same time, Jetz sent the entire lab a series of emails “that got progressively unhinged,” as one postdoc put it, describing the accusations as “fringe or extreme views.””
Of course Jetz’ behaviour is nothing special in academia. Many principal investigators behave even worse. Even Jetz’ victims understand this.
For the public and the community. Jetz is painted as a hero who saves species from extinction.
Scholarly Publishing
Carefully reviewed and resolved
Aneurus Inconstans continues draining the bottomless Italian fraud swamp. One of the authors of the following paper, Giovanni Li Volti, featured in an earlier article:
The Name of the Foes
“I am Jorge de Burgos. I believe research should pause in searching for the progress of knowledge. Right now, we don’t need more papers, we rather need more knowledge by going through a continuous and sublime recapitulation to figure out what is true and what is fake” – Aneurus Inconstans
Now, Aneurus did what they tell every sleuth to do: he used the “proper channels” and contacted the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, the Vanderbilt University professor Craig W. Lindsley. The journal is published by the prestigious American Chemical Society (ACS).
Orazio Prezzavento , Agata Campisi, Simone Ronsisvalle, Giovanni Li Volti, Agostino Marrazzo, Vincenzo Bramanti , Giuseppe Cannavò , Luca Vanella , Alfredo Cagnotto , Tiziana Mennini , Riccardo Ientile , Giuseppe Ronsisvalle Novel Sigma Receptor Ligands: Synthesis and Biological Profile Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (2007) doi: 10.1021/jm0611197
Panel d also has cloned internal features (yellow boxes).“
This was the reply Aneurus received from the Journal Office Administrator Jelena Savic, “on behalf of Prof. Craig W. Lindsley“:
“Dear Aneurus Inconstans, Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. The editors have carefully reviewed and resolved the matter according to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. We now consider this case closed and will not be taking further action regarding this article.”
I suggest to Vanderbilt students to start cheating, plagiarising and lying in Lindsay’s courses and when caught, declare to “have carefully reviewed and resolved the matter according to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines” and now “consider this case closed”.
Valid and correct
Another publisher, this time Wiley, resolved the matter in a similar way. Only that they proved themselves even more stupid that I estimated them, by saying the quiet part out loud.
It was a case I reported in Friday Shorts before. The Wiley journal Advanced Energy Materials sports an awe-inspiring impact factor of almost 30. Here is its quality science made in China, flagged by Thallarcha lechrioleuca. I reported the two fraudulent papers to Wiley in January 2023. The common author is Fazal Raziq of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, who published even more fraud, see PubPeer.
The journal’s two chief editors are two German men, Christoph Brabec, materials science professor at the University of Erlangen, and Manfred Waidhas, former Siemens employee and now “independent consultant”.
Amir Zada , Muhammad Humayun , Fazal Raziq , Xuliang Zhang , Yang Qu , Linlu Bai , Chuanli Qin , Liqiang Jing , Honggang Fu Exceptional Visible-Light-Driven Cocatalyst-Free Photocatalytic Activity of g-C3N4by Well Designed Nanocomposites with Plasmonic Au and SnO2 Advanced Energy Materials (2016) doi: 10.1002/aenm.201601190
This is the second paper:
Fazal Raziq , Liqun Sun , Yuying Wang , Xuliang Zhang , Muhammad Humayun , Sharafat Ali , Linlu Bai , Yang Qu , Haitao Yu , Liqiang Jing Synthesis of Large Surface-Area g-C3N4 Comodified with MnOx and Au-TiO2 as Efficient Visible-Light Photocatalysts for Fuel Production Advanced Energy Materials (2018) doi: 10.1002/aenm.201701580
Now the Wiley reply arrived, signed by Carolina Novo da Silva of Advanced Energy Materials:
“Dear Mr. Schneider,
Thank you once again for your e-mail and for bringing the two pubpeer posts regarding Advanced Energy Materials articles to our attention. […]
I am contacting you to share the outcome of our investigations. We investigated the corresponding manuscripts in alignment with COPE-guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts/image-manipulation-published-article and https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts/suspected-fabricated-data-published-manuscript).
Regarding the first post, concerning noise signals in manuscript aenm.201601190, we have decided, after consulting and clarifying the issues with the authors and reviewers, that no further action is necessary. The results of our investigation lead us to believe that the manuscript and its results and conclusions, as they stand, are valid and correct.
The second post, concerning figures and noise signals in the manuscript aenm.2017001580 and its Supporting Information, was considered in two separate parts. First, similarly to the first post, we looked at the accusations regarding the noise signals in some figures in the main manuscript. In looking at these aspects, we have decided, after consulting and clarifying the issues with the authors and reviewers, that no further action is needed. The results of our investigation lead us to believe that the manuscript and its results and conclusions, as they stand, are valid and correct.
Regarding the data presented in the Supporting Information, after consulting with the authors, we found that indeed some figures contained data that was, in its smoothing processing previous to plotting, significantly changed. After consulting also with the reviewers, it was decided to publish a Correction, presenting the new correct data plotted for the figures that were previously incorrect. The Correction will be published soon.
Once again, I would like to thank you for bring up these issues, we appreciate you coming forward.
I think they really believe their own stupid drivel about this outrageously fake Chinese trash. Worse, they are that thick that they seek to re-educate me. Must be the Chinese Communist Party ideology colouring off.
The information is now correct
A correction by Elsevier. In this difficult times when Iran’s regime is busy terrorizing both its own people as well as Ukrainians, the publisher pledged its allegiance to an Iranian papermill.
Nima Abdyazdani , Alireza Nourazarian , Hojjatollah Nozad Charoudeh , Masoumeh Kazemi , Navid Feizy , Maryam Akbarzade , Amir Mehdizadeh , Jafar Rezaie , Reza Rahbarghazi The role of morphine on rat neural stem cells viability, neuro-angiogenesis and neuro-steroidgenesis properties Neuroscience Letters (2017) doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2016.11.025
On 28 March 2023, this Corrigendum was issued, and not even hinted on the main article’s page:
“The authors regret that Figure 2 panel A was updated and representative bright-field images were included. We have changed this figure such that the information is now correct. This change does not alter the scientific content of the paper. In title of article, misspelled word “neuro-steroidgenesis” was replaced with “neuro-steroidogenesis”. The correct form of our co-author name is Maryam Akbarzadeh.”
The responsible chief editor is Pamela E. Knapp, professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, USA. She is assited by two deputy chief editors, Temple University professor Sayed Ausim Azizi and NIH senior investigator Douglas R. D. Fields.
One of the authors, Reza Rahbarghazi, openly admitted to image manipulation on PubPeer:
“The original bright-field figures were selected in correction formats. The figures were polished by photoshop software to exclude the debris where the number of neurospheres are original without manipulation that does not affect the presented data in the first article and correction format”
Warning about a Suspicious Website
Somebody set up another blacklist of predatory publishers. It is called Predatory Reports, they not only blacklist journals and publishers, but also bring news, like here, about the recent delisting of 82 papermilling journals, 15 of them by Hindawi, from Web of Science by Clarivate. The latter even issued a press release.
Naturally, Hindawi, but also MDPI and Frontiers landed on this blacklist. And just like back then with Jeffrey Beall, when they sent lawyers to get taken off the blacklist (in MDPI’s case) or to have the entire blacklist deleted completely (Fronters), they now threaten lawsuits. But only in the Chinese-language press releases!
Beall-listed Frontiers empire strikes back
The Swiss publishing business Frontiers was placed by the US librarian Jeffrey Beall on his well-known and hotly disputed list as “potential, possible or probable predatory publisher”. Frontiers however was not prepared to take this lying down. The publisher’s Executive Editor Frederick Fenter first tried it nicely. Shortly before Christmas 2015, he flew to visit Beall at…
In their Chinese announcement from 31 March 2023, Frontiers openly speaks of lawsuits (translated):
“The information about Frontiers on this website contains serious factual errors and even falsified facts that have adversely affected Frontiers’ reputation. Frontiers will take aggressive action, including legal action, against the website for such actions.”
MDPI (whose owner is Chinese) writes on 31 March 2023 (translated):
“In order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of MDPI, we have entrusted a lawyer to complete the evidence collection of the above-mentioned infringement, and will file a lawsuit through legal channels to investigate the infringement responsibility of the above-mentioned infringing subject. MDPI will never condone any illegal acts that maliciously infringe upon our company’s legitimate rights and interests, and solemnly warn all infringing subjects to immediately stop the infringement, delete all infringing information suspected of violating MDPI’s legitimate rights and interests, and stop dissemination, diffusion and reprinting of all infringing information , also ask relevant platforms to take necessary measures to stop the spread and dissemination of false information”
MDPI and racism
In 2019, MDPI published a Special Issue “Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability”, one year later its owner Shu-Kun Lin expressed admiration for Trump and said “Black Lives Matter. White Lives Matter. All Lives Matter.”
The peculiar thing: the English language announcements contain no legal threats at all. You are to think that MDPI and Frontiers are nice, and merely wish to clarify and to discuss. MDPI issued on 14 March 2023 a statement titled “Warning about a Suspicious Website Denouncing MDPI Journals“:
“Scholars have reported a suspicious website (predatoryreports.org) that has made false claims against the legitimacy of MDPI journals. The anonymous website in question lacks transparency and rigor in its evaluation criteria, and has an apparent bias against MDPI and open access publishing.
At MDPI, we recommend the use of well-known and transparent sources, such as Think.Check.Submit and indexing databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ, and PubMed for evaluating journals. MDPI’s journals are indexed within discoverable databases, with many journals experiencing a yearly increase in Impact Factor”.
No mention of any legal threats at all. Similar with Frontiers, who posted this on 31 March 2023, “Misinformation website – alerting our community“, no mention of a lawsuit in preparation hinted in Chinese:
“We do not advise our community to refer to this website as a trusted source of information and consider it to be yet another predatory index, which intentionally seeks to mislead the research community.”
Hindawi (also blacklisted) and its new owner Wiley hasn’t issued anything though. They are busy retracting their papermill fraud. After 511 previously announced retractions, 1200 more will follow, as a publisher exec wrote on 4 April 2023 on Scholarly Kitchen.
Industry Giants
Holy Grail
Paul Knoepfler blogs about Mariusz Ratajczak‘s imaginary “very small stem cells”(VSEL):
“The latest on VSELs is a review article in the great journal Stem Cells. The paper is pushing the usual about VSELs along with a new angle on cancer. Here are the authors: Deepa Bhartiya, Nripen Sharma, Shruti Dutta, Piyush Kumar, Ashish Tripathi, and Anish Tripathi. […] It pushes a purported early cancer diagnostic test somehow related to VSELs. As some of the authors disclose, they have a company marketing this.”
This is the Tripathi paper:
Deepa Bhartiya , Nripen Sharma , Shruti Dutta , Piyush Kumar , Ashish Tripathi Very Small Embryonic-Like Stem Cells Transform Into Cancer Stem Cells and are Novel Candidates for Detecting/Monitoring Cancer by a Simple Blood Test Stem Cells (2023) doi: 10.1093/stmcls/sxad015
And look who is advertising for it:
And it made news! Here, in New York Post:
“The future of cancer treatment — hailed as the “holy grail” of early detection — is now being put to the test.
Following a radically successful trial on cancer patients, a new blood test that promises to predict tumors more than a year before they begin to form is now being applied in hospitals across the United Kingdom.
“This is the first pan-cancer blood test,” said Ashish Tripathi, founder and CEO of Tzar Labs as well as chairman of Epigeneres Biotech, the Indian firm where the test was first developed in 2021. An updated report on their findings was published this month in the journal Stem Cells.
“We can detect [cancer] earlier than other known technologies … before the tumor has physically formed,” Tripathi continued during a new interview with author and medical advocate Deepak Chopra.”
This fake crap is already being applied in British hospitals. Hailed by none other but Deepak Chopra.
Guilty pleasures of meditating with Deepak Chopra
Smut Clyde will take you on a meditative Ayurvedic trip where the most respectable of research institutions and their world-renowned academics were caught dancing with the Guru Deepak Chopra himself. Famous cardiologist and medical writer Eric Topol and the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn were just two most prominent US academics listed on Chopra’s Panchakarma…
Apparently there was an earlier trial where Tripathi’s fake VSEL crap was successfully used to convince healthy people that they had cancer:
“In a trial of 1,000 participants — 500 non-cancer and 500 cancer patients — researchers were able to accurately anticipate the formation of tumors across at least 25 types of cancer, including all of the most prevalent and deadly varieties, such as breast, pancreatic, lung and colorectal. Even some participants within the presumed “non-cancer” group were found to have a predisposition for future cancer diagnosis.”
According the the British tabloid The Express, follow-up trials are being set up:
“Imperial College, Manchester University and Cardiff University are drawing up “proof of concept” trials, while scientists at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, will hold a larger study. Dr Sherif Raouf, a leading consultant gastrointestinal cancer specialist who will lead a trial at St Barts, said: “Picking up cancer at the earliest stage is the holy grail of cancer medicine.”
Here an earlier breakthrough by Tripathi’s team:
Sagar Chhabria , Vaishnavi Takle , Nripen Sharma , Prashant Kharkar , Kshama Pansare , Anish Tripathi , Ashish Tripathi , Deepa Bhartiya Extremely Active Nano-formulation of Resveratrol (XAR™) attenuates and reverses chemotherapy-induced damage in mice ovaries and testes Journal of Ovarian Research (2022) doi: 10.1186/s13048-022-01043-8
The paper was retracted on 24 March 2023:
“The authors have been unable to locate the original images, and therefore no longer have confidence in the presented data.”
A German cure
Elsewhere in the world, quack cures get approved for therapies on daily basis. But in Germany, the Paul Ehrlich Institute is watching over the patient safety.
A press release, somewhat older (October 2021), but so reassuring (not):
“Germany’s Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines (Paul-Ehrlich-Institut) grants RHEACELL national approval for its cell therapy product AMESANAR(R) for the use in patients with chronic wounds. […]
RHEACELL, a German biopharmaceutical company focused on clinical development of novel stem cell therapeutics, has been granted national approval under § 4b of the German Medicinal Products Act for its novel cell therapy product AMESANAR(R). AMESANAR(R) (allogeneic ABCB5-positive mesenchymal stromal cells), manufactured by TICEBA GmbH from donor skin, is an Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) and can be used in patients with chronic wounds caused by chronic venous insufficiency.”
I wrote about TICEBA and its subsidiary Rheacell, and their owner Christoph Ganss, already in 2015 and tried to get German authorities to stop this stem cell circus.
Stem cell cures for everything, Made in Germany by TICEBA
The Heidelberg-based company TICEBA (abbreviated from Tissue & Cell Banking) is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill cell bank. This German company, scientifically advised by the Harvard professor Markus Frank, claims that our skin contains pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of curing all kinds of diseases. This concept is utterly unsupported by scientific literature, and is…
To no avail, Ticeba ran several clinical trials in collaboration with German universities. Here for example University of Ulm immensely celebrating their clinical collaboration with Ticeba, which resulted in the approval above. Ganss currently waits for his “stem cells” to be approved for other skin diseases.
News in Tweets
- The Lancet, while staunchly refusing to retract outright fraud and patient abuse by Macchiarini and others, swiftly followed orders from China and retracted a COVID-19 paper for daring to issue minor criticism on the Chinese health care system (“As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end in China, medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to fight the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant are now facing a new challenge. Despite their heroic efforts, many of them are now struggling to receive the financial compensation they deserve.”. Retraction for Sun et al 2013: “On March 27, 2023, we were informed by the authors of this Correspondence1 that it contains inaccurate statements and personal opinions from social media, and they wish to withdraw the piece. In light of this information, we have agreed to retract this Correspondence.“
- New revelations in the case of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne – his former employer Genentech divulges yet another fraud incident, as student newspaper Stanford Daily reports: “Genentech’s findings also revealed information about previously unreported misconduct claims, saying that “there was a complaint in mid-2010 alleging scientific misconduct by another postdoc working in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory.” The postdoctoral researcher, who was not an author of the Nature 2009 paper, co-authored a manuscript with Tessier-Lavigne that was submitted for publication. But “the complaint led to a formal investigation by the company, resulting in withdrawal of that manuscript and termination of the postdoc’s employment in August 2010.”
- Publicly shaming editors works.
Zombie fingers inside corroded nano-piecrusts
Smut Clyde is back with more fraudulent nanotechnology. This time, he presents the works of Dhanaraj Gopi, who designs fabricated surfaces for surgical implants. In Photoshop, or with a pencil.
- More MDPI trash.
- Dorothy Bishop publishes her failed communication with Rémy Mosseri, Scientific Integrity Officer of the French CNRS, who refused to discuss even general policies: “Dear Mrs Bishop, I understand that you do not agree with our imperative rules of confidentiality, and with the form under which an allegation should be sent to us in order to possibly open an investigation. It seems that, as a general principle, emails have the same status as private correspondance, and should therefore not be tranferred to third parties without the consent of the author of the email.”
- One really has to love French academia!
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For Better Science 
hi Leonid,
Am I right to assume that the “University Hospital Würzburg”, the “Leopoldina Hospital Schweinfurt”, the “Biomedical Research Center of the Justus-Liebig University” and the “Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam” are (tacitly) endorsing a crap publication about the PCR test in a notorious antivax journal, see https://doi.org/10.56098/ijvtpr.v3i1.71 ?
Am I right to assume that “The Independent Research Institute on Information and Origins, Lörrach, Germany” does not exist?
Author Pieter Borger does not inform readers of this new publication that he is a Research Associate at LOGOS https://www.logosresearchassociates.org/about-us/dr.-pieter-borger and that he is employed by Wort und Wissen https://veranstaltungen.wort-und-wissen.org/referenten/borger/
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hi Leonid, see https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/retrospective-censorship-the-new for some views of Norman Fenton about undisclosed conflicts of interests.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/FF3851BBE50B48531F8A4675E8083E
https://pubpeer.com/publications/D0B8DA67E5844BEB10F3634FDB38DE
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I would like to reassure Dorothy Bishop: using “Mrs. Bishop” instead of “Dr Bishop” is obviously rude and unpolite between scientists, it’s not a cultural difference! And Mr. Mosseri message is typical mansplaining (unfortunately, we have no equivalent word in French). But rudeness is a hallmark of CNRS, if one remembers the way its president, “Little Antoine”, called Leonid. As a French scientist, I’m ashamed of what CNRS became.
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They are not just rude, but pathetic chickenshits. When they know they can’t have you sacked or sued, they go very quiet.
Mosseri is at best a ” useful idiot”, and Petit is just an utter cock.
Spadavecchia already has 3 retractions despite CNRS’s best efforts to prevent them, and they still defend her and bully even respectable foreign peers like Prof Bishop
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx#?auth%3dSpadavecchia%252c%2bJolanda
Sad tossers.
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I agree with everything you write, Leonid! Simply, I’m using my own words, which reflect my age and habits 🙂
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https://genetics.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/stephen-j-elledge-phd
Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics at Harvard, Stephen Elledge, discovered a new physical principal in the 2000s! Full implications not appreciated at the time.
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Elledge+
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I am very glad mdpi frontiers and hindawi are finally call out for what they are. There are some ok journals among them, with honnest editors. But the amount of stupidity they have published during covid is so high they deserve to be regarded as bad publishers. I know you can find bad science anywhere.
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Even outright predatory publishers occasionally have good papers. That’s not the point. When a publisher makes it their business model to publish literally anything from paying customers, this is predatory publishing. As the saying goes: You’ve shat you bed, now lie in it.
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Yes I agree. Mdpi is very smart because they put out journals about specific topics, such as Toxins, that end up gathering the good science of people studying exotic venoms, for example. But I agree that doesn’t absolve mdpi, nor does it make it non-predatory.
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“Without me, the University of Córdoba will drop 300 positions. They shot themselves in the foot”
That tells you right away the “value” of such rankings…
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I have notified COPE about the incredible reply from Craig W. Lindsley and Jelena Savic.
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This is the reply by Iratxe Puebla, Facilitation and Integrity Officer at COPE:
Dear reader, I acknowledge receipt of the submission to COPE regarding the publication in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry titled “Novel sigma receptor ligands: synthesis and biological profile”. I have raised this matter to the attention of a member of the Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee for their input and I will be in touch in due course.
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