Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
Yehuda Shoenfield is either a genius or a quack of autoimmunity research, depending on which side you stand in the antivax debate. He is also apparently a plagiarist, even Wikipedia is not safe. And this is why he is now a Member of Israel Academy of Sciences.
The University of Manchester found out that someone has secretly manipulated data in the papers of their star cancer researcher, Richard Marais. Who might that be?
Magdalena Migocka is a shooting star of plant sciences in Poland. Now she will have to retract at least two papers, for which she blames her incompetent students.
The new ERC President Mauro Ferrari used to closely collaborate with two very controversial cancer researchers at MD Anderson in Texas: Anil Sood and Gabriel Lopez-Beerestein. Will that experience affect ERC’s already wanting stance on research integrity?
The Plant Cell is getting a new Editor-in-Chief, Sally Assmann. In a sense, she brings with her the necessary expertise in research integrity this journal sorely needs.
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.
On 27 December 2018, I received an email from the Italian Office for Protection of Personal Data. A certain Professor Giorgio Zauli has reported me for publishing an official letter his University of Ferrara sent to me on his behalf.
The 2015 Nature Cell Biology paper by the Spanish cancer researcher Carlos Lopez-Otin and his US partner George Q Daley, stem cell titan and dean of Harvard Medical School, is being retracted. First author and Lopez-Otin’s student Clara Soria-Valles caused Daley even more trouble: her next groundbreaking paper was meant to be already published, but it is not even submitted and might never be.
A decision was announced by the Swedish Prosecution Authority in Gothenburg on the Paolo Macchiarini case today. The issue are plastic trachea transplants the scandal surgeon performed at the hospital of the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. The earlier decision by state prosecutor was changed in part and the preliminary investigation will be reopened
First gene-edited human babies were allegedly born, two twin girls. Jiankui He, associate professor at the South University of Science and Technology of China claimed to have used CRISPR gene editing technology, in a registered clinical trial, to make babies resistant to HIV. Did this really happen? In any case, everyone now takes distance to He.
