Journals deny corrections to Chiara Francavilla
Manchester scientist Chiara Francavilla discovered duplicated images in her older papers and submitted correction requests to Molecular Cell and JCB, only to be ignored.
Author: Leonid Schneider
Independent Science Journalist and Cartoonist.
Formerly molecular cell biologist. My academic CV at: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6204-9470
The Passion of Don Carlos
I obtained a partial script of a stage play which recently premiered in Paris: “La Passion de Don Carlos”. Any similarities with Spanish or French cancer researchers are entirely coincidental.
New government cash for trachea transplanters Videregen
The trachea-transplanting company Videregen, based in Liverpool, got another £2 million grant from UK governmental agency Innovate UK, to advance their tracheal replacement technology.
Inspector Voinnet, Wollman in fraud-overdrive, and Farewell to Jessus
Catherine Jessus resigned, Olivier Voinnet solves the crime he was suspected of, and their mutual investigator Francis-Andre Wollman might want to investigate his own papers
Spanish elites rally in support of data manipulation
Carlos Lopez-Otin was forced to retract EIGHT papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, right after he retracted a very important paper in Nature Cell Biology. Spanish elites cry foul, a letter signed by 50 Spanish researchers was sent to JBC to prevent retractions. The ringleader is Juan Valcarcel of CRG in Barcelona, and I release 3 incompetent investigative reports Valcarcel commissioned in 2015 to whitewash his CRG colleague Maria Pia Cosma.
Preprinters of the World Unite
The following is a rant in praise of preprints. I blog of usefulness of preprints, open science and open access, how BioRxiv works and their Plan U.
The Bio-Talent of nanofabrication in Poland
A scientifically subterranean topic at Frontiers leads to a discovery of cheater talents in Poland: a duo of EU-funded nanofabricators from Pakistan. Does any of their papers contain any actual research data, or is it all just made up?
Chinese university hospital denounces “malicious attack” by Western vaccine industry
Manipulated data in 17 papers from one cancer research lab in China gets flagged on PubPeer. It ends with the university hospital in Wuhan issuing a secret statement accusing the US pharma giant a Merck of a conspiracy to slander a Chinese Academy member, Dr Ding Ma.
Plan S in chaos at Berlin APE conference
Plan S, designed by the former EU Commissioner Robert-Jan Smits, became a complete and chaotic mess where everyone, including the members of the signatory cOAlition S of research founders, does whatever they want. I learned all that while participating at the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) conference in Berlin, on 15-16 January.
Texas Photoshop Massacre (in Nature)
The team around the paediatric oncologist Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, discovered a way to engineer T-leukocytes to bypass the blood-brain barrier at attack otherwise untreatable brain cancers. Their amazing technology to get this published in Nature was brazenly insolent data fakery.
For Better Science 