Schneider Shorts 11.08.2023 – Spoiled in a damaged box

Schneider Shorts of 11 August 2023 – a science superstar corrects a paper, Royal Society of Chemistry corrects an even better paper, a whistleblower acquitted, a cheater whitewashed, with Hindawi mass-retractions, duped MIT investors, and finally, a wrong editor to solve fraud issues.

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Scholarly Publishing

An explanatory note

Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) used to be a society journal, owned by the American Society for Microbiology. In December 2022, the journal has been sold to Taylor & Francis, and a new Editor-in-Chief appointed: Tony Tiganis, biochemistry professor at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Now Tiganis announced to submit a correction to himself for approval.

Tiganis wrote on PubPeer:

“The panels in Fig 4a correspond to Fig. 6a and were used by mistake due to a labelling error. This will be corrected with the publisher“

I am sure the Editor-in-Chief will approve of the intended correction. Dr Tiganis can also correct this paper of his, and explain how the figure remains meaningful despite the spliced-on gel lanes:

To be fair, Tiganis’s co-authors here are Barbara Kahn and Benjamin Neel. the former is not to be trusted with science, and I wrote about the latter in earlier Friday Shorts. The PubPeer-recorded issues with Tiganis’s papers are mostly about inappropriately spliced or duplicated western blots. Yet also for this Cell paper, Neel placed the responsibility for the fudged immunohistochemistry with Tiganis:

Garron T. Dodd , Stephanie Decherf , Kim Loh , Stephanie E. Simonds , Florian Wiede , Eglantine Balland , Troy L. Merry , Heike Münzberg , Zhong-Yin Zhang , Barbara B. Kahn, Benjamin G. Neel , Kendra K. Bence , Zane B. Andrews , Michael A. Cowley , Tony Tiganis Leptin and insulin act on POMC neurons to promote the browning of white fat Cell (2015) doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.12.022

This study by Tiganis, Kahn and Neel will need a new correction:

Another co-author you met above, UC Davis professor and department Vice-Chair Fawaz Haj, also seems to be a regular collaborator of Tiganis:

Ahmed Bettaieb , Siming Liu , Yannan Xi , Naoto Nagata , Kosuke Matsuo , Izumi Matsuo , Samah Chahed , Jesse Bakke , Heike Keilhack , Tony Tiganis, Fawaz G. Haj Differential regulation of endoplasmic reticulum stress by protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B and T cell protein tyrosine phosphatase Journal of Biological Chemistry (2011) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m110.186148 

I’m not sure this can be fixed with a correction. Tiganis replied on PubPeer twice, both times his comments were moderated for some reason. The deleted Tony comments were:

“The senior author on this paper is Fawaz Haj and all the experimental work was undertaken in his lab”

More sloppy science by Tiganis and Haj:

This is Tiganis’s collaborative paper, but still worth pointing fingers at:

Belinda J. Michell , T Tiganis , D Stapleton , F Katsis , D A Power , A T Sim , B E Kemp Coordinated control of endothelial nitric-oxide synthase phosphorylation by protein kinase C and the cAMP-dependent protein kinase Journal of Biological Chemistry (2001) doi: 10.1074/jbc.c100122200 

Again Tiganis with the same University of Melbourne professor Bruce Kemp, with a totally fudged gel:

One shouldn’t trust these gels either. Or the scientists who made them.

Now what kind of attitude to research integrity do you expect from the MCB Editor-in-Chief Tiganis? Clare Francis alerted him to the case of a problematic French INSERM researcher and local politician Stéphane Dalle (his growing PubPeer record here), specifically this paper in MCB, with very similar manipulations as in Tiganis’s own papers:

Stéphane Dalle , Takeshi Imamura , David W Rose , Dorothy Sears Worrall , Satoshi Ugi , Christopher J Hupfeld , Jerrold M Olefsky Insulin induces heterologous desensitization of G-protein-coupled receptor and insulin-like growth factor I signaling by downregulating beta-arrestin-1 Molecular and cellular biology (2002) doi: 10.1128/mcb.22.17.6272-6285.2002 

Tiganis replied to Clare Francis:

“Thank you for alerting us to this data inconsistency. We will be alerting the senior author to provide an explanatory note and if possible rectify the matter“

An explanatory note, nothing else.

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Spoiled in a damaged box

A lot of papermill fraud ends up being cited in meta-studies and literature reviews. In rare cases, those writing such reviews and meta-analyses actually read what they are citing.

Read what happened to this Chinese paper:

Chih-Zen Chang, Shu-Chuan Wu , Aij-Lie Kwan , Chih-Lung Lin Magnesium Lithospermate B Implicates 3′-5′-Cyclic Adenosine Monophosphate/Protein Kinase A Pathway and N-Methyl-d-Aspartate Receptors in an Experimental Traumatic Brain Injury World Neurosurgery (2015) doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2015.05.075

René Aquarius, a postdoc at the Radboud University, posted this on PubPeer:

“Dear authors,

While working on a systematic review we included several of your papers. When analyzing the figures in these studies, we noticed a considerable overlap between figures published in different studies. We’ve lined up all the overlaps we’ve found so far in the attached figures at the bottom of this message, including the ones specified below related specifically to this study.

In this study we found an overlap between figure 1, panel A and:

• PMID 26163325, figure 1, panels D & G
• PMID 25894080, figure 1, panel A

For transparency: we will also notify the journals that published your papers with our findings

Best, René Aquarius”

The “author” of the criticised study, Chih-Zen Chang, replied on PubPeer:

“Dear sir: Thanks for the comments. The figures were original at all. The particles looks similar, but the brightness, distance and contours were different , under the high power field. Thanks again. We apologize for unable to. offer the original films, caused they were spoiled in a damaged box.“

Almost a name for a grunge band.

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Inappropriately superimposed

In earlier Friday Shorts, I wrote about Kostya “Ken” Ostrikov, the Ukrainian-born professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, who published a fake paper with some Iranians.

Ali Fatemi , Tavakkol Tohidi , Kazem Jamshidi-Galeh, Milad Rasouli, Kostya Ostrikov Optical and structural properties of Sn and Ag-doped PbS/PVA nanocomposites synthesized by chemical bath deposition Scientific Reports (2022) doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16666-6 

When contacted a few months ago, Ostrikov replied immediately and explained to me:

“I am only trying to help very few young and aspiring people who do not have world-class opportunities for scientific research in their countries and want to build careers internationally, so to say “escape” for a better opportunity. […]

I have immediately checked the comment and contacted the first and corresponding author to carefully check the XRD spectra highlighted in the comment, and the original data.

I also carefully explained them the proper actions to take to respond to the comment, make corrections if this is just an error (e.g., in data processing, etc.) which does not affect the conclusions of the work“

And this was what Ostrikov did. On 28 July 2023, he achieved a Correction:

“The original version of this Article contained errors in Figure 1. During preparation of Figure 1 some of the data has been inappropriately superimposed. As a result, in Figure 1A a section of the spectrum for the “0.6 μM Sn” condition overlapped with a corresponding section in the spectrum of the “0.3 μM Sn” condition. A section of the spectrum for the “0.8 μM Ag” condition overlapped with corresponding sections in the spectra for “0.4 μM Ag” in Figure 1B, and “0.6 μM Sn” and “0.3 μM Sn” conditions in Figure 1A.”

The bad Figure 1 was replaced with this new version:

However, the new Figure 1b is fake also. Worse, the problem was already flagged on PubPeer in April 2023. But hey, Scientific Reports already accepted the correction, and Kostya is a self-professed science superstar, so the case is closed.

This time, Ostrikov did not reply to my email. Not yet.

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Confirmed by an investigation from the affiliated institution

Another inappropriate correction, this time for some Indian crooks led by Amita Verma from University of Allahabad, with a hefty PubPeer record and a list of retractions. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) now looks very stupid and incompetent. Aneurus Inconstans previously wrote about Verma and her colleagues:

That was why the paper previously received an Expression of Concern.

And from “Figure 5 of yet another paper by same group (Yadav et al 2017 Biomed Pharmacother) published a year before. Treatment and topic were different.“

In February 2023, RSC issued an Expression of Concern:

“The authors have provided a replacement figure for consideration and say that the new data does not affect the conclusions of the paper. The Royal Society of Chemistry has asked the affiliated institution to investigate this matter and establish whether the replacement images provided by the authors provide an accurate representation of the experiments that were conducted, and confirm the integrity and reliability of the new data provided.“

Now behold, the resulting Correction from 28 July 2023:

“The authors regret that there was an error in Fig. 3 whereby incorrect wound healing images were used. This was due to poor management of a large dataset of photographs and we apologize for this purely unintentional error. The correct Fig. 3 is provided herein. The accuracy and integrity of the replacement images in Fig. 3 have been confirmed by an investigation from the affiliated institution.“

Photographic representation of the wound healing process in the excision wound model, showing the control (Group 1), standard drug (Group 2), ZnOTP1% treated (Group 3) and ZnOTP2% treated (Group 4) at 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 17 days post wounding.

This correction supersedes the information provided in the Expression of Concern related to this article.

The Royal Society of Chemistry apologises for these errors and any consequent inconvenience to authors and readers.“

Incredible, eh? But it’s even worse, as one PubPeer commenter noted:

“I do not understand the first row of the corrected Figure. It uses just one image for all four conditions, but these should be four separate wounds, presumably on four separate mice.“

Indeed, this first row make no sense at all, even if one disregards all the other issues. It only proves the authors don’t even understand what exactly they were faking. But it passed institutional investigation, and peer review at RSC and another publisher. It is YOU who does science wrong.

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No data were used to support this study

Elisabeth Bik blogged about mass retractions at Hindawi:

“A simple search on the Hindawi website shows that the number of retractions might be even much higher. Hindawi retracted its first paper in 2009. From 2009 to 2019, Hindawi retracted an average of 26 papers per year. But in 2022, the publisher published 351 retractions, and in 2023 that number skyrocketed to 3936 – and it is only August!

Elisabeth also has a the list of papermill-affected journals and their retractions, all with the same retraction notice which mentions “Inappropriate citations – Incoherent, meaningless and/or irrelevant content included in the article – Peer-review manipulation“:

• BioMed Research International [142 papers retracted]
• Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine [423]
• Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience [585]
• Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging [138]
• Disease Markers [120]
• Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine [459]
• Journal of Environmental and Public Health [216]
• Journal of Healthcare Engineering [396]
• Journal of Nanomaterials [42]
• Mathematical Problems in Engineering [210]
• Mobile Information Systems [190]
• Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity [45]
• Scanning [46]
• Scientific Programming [84]
• Security and Communication Networks [241]
• Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing [437]

Elisabeth discusses some of the papermill publications, and also invites you to join the hunt:

“As a side project, the search term “No data were used to support this study” returns over 8,000 results in Google Scholar, many of which are on the Hindawi.com site. One has to appreciate that no data was harmed to create these fake papers! Many of these papers deserve scrutiny, so if you have some free time, please help by writing some critical reviews on PubPeer.

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Industry Giants

Help Syrian refugees

New reporting on the case of the fraudulent Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) business with phony “food computers” by the MIT and its Media Lab. Basically, the former MIT researcher Caleb Harper claimed to have created a magic box where all possible foods can grow, which he proved by buying veg in a supermarket and stuffing those into his box to be photographed. As it happens, MIT Media Lab used to be sponsored by the convicted paedophile and billionaire pimp Jeffrey Epstein. In earlier Friday Shorts, I previously wrote about this scam and the former MIT researcher Babak Babakinejad who was fired for blowing the whistle. He then sued the university.

Now Bizjournals reports:

“The university, through its lawyers in recent court hearings, has denied that there was any research misconduct and has fought efforts to force the college to disclose OpenAg’s fundraising information. But in July, a judge ordered the school to disclose to prosecutors “any fundraising goal(s) established by MIT for the project; and … the total amount raised for the project.”

While the judge’s order doesn’t say MIT must disclose names of donors, the university’s own website shows that at least 14 corporate sponsors gave money to the project. Contracts reviewed by the Business Journal for a handful of those deals show that at least $4.9 million was raised, although the actual amount raised may be significantly higher, since those contracts only cover three of the 14 donors listed on MIT’s website. […]

The project also appears to earned a grant of nearly $250,000 from the U.S. State Department in July 2017 to share the technology with a university in Vietnam, according to a government website and an associated purchase order obtained by the Business Journal. According to a person involved in the partnership, no technology was ever sent to Vietnam as a result. While it’s unclear whether MIT ever actually spent any of the grant money, it wasn’t until September 2022 — more than two years after the project was shut down, and a month after the Business Journal published a cover story on OpenAg — that the university appears to have quietly “deobligated,” or cancelled the disbursement of, the grant money.”

Among Open Ag industry sponsors were Indian textile manufacturer Welspun ($1.6 million), Italian chocolate maker Ferrero ($250,000), US retailer Target Corp. ($3 million) and others including “General Mills, Google, National Geographic, Unilever, IDEO and Lee Kum Kee.”

This is really mean:

“It’s unclear when the university became aware of allegations of research misconduct at OpenAg. A letter in May 2018 from Babakinejad, the researcher now suing MIT, to MIT’s general counsel’s office raised doubts about the research methods more than a year before those allegations became public. But according to an October 2019 report by IEEE Spectrum, there was evidence in early 2017 that a widely publicized project to send food computers to help Syrian refugees did not work.”

MIT is busy hushing up the affair. Harper was let go, the whistleblower was sacked, Epstein is dead, can we please just forget and move on? Also about the investor money?

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News in Brief

• Philadelphia Inquirer reports: “Steven Houser, a prominent Temple University heart-disease scientist involved in a bitter research feud with longtime colleague Arthur Feldman, has settled a federal lawsuit against Feldman and the school, and is retiring in June. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. […] Still unclear is the status of a university investigation into possible misconduct on more than a dozen studies on heart disease, at least nine of which were co-authored by Houser“. You can read the background of this story here:

• In the case of Italian exosome researcher Christina Frezza (read earlier Friday Shorts here and here) and his fake exosomes in Frezza et al Cell 2006, his current employer University of Cologne in Germany made a decision. Oliver Höing, PA of the Vice-Rector for Research, informed me (translated): “As part of administrative assistance, the University of Padua has confidentially sent us its investigation report on the case you have reported (https://forbetterscience.com/2023/04/21/schneider-shorts-21-04-2023-so-much-work -of-high-quality/#frezza) concluding that there was no scientific misconduct. From the point of view of the Good Scientific Practice Commission of the University of Cologne, there is therefore no sufficient suspicion to initiate an investigation.” The trick is to always try to avoid an investigation. So this is how scientists at Universities of Padova and Cologne are expected to do science:

• Michael Balter reported on 7 August 2023: “This morning in Lima, Peru, a judge dismissed a long-running defamation case by archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters against Peruvian anthropologist Marcela Poirier, whose only crime was to expose his misconduct. The dismissal comes on the heels of Castillo’s loss in a defamation suit he had filed in U.S. federal court against the National Academy of Sciences and its president, Marcia McNutt, after the NAS kicked him out after its own investigation into his behavior. […] The judge in the Lima suit dismissed the case with prejudice (meaning it cannot be refiled) after Castillo and his attorney failed to appear in court.” Read about the backstory on Balter’s blog and my summaries here.

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