By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Schneider Shorts 25.07.2025 – Iranian papermiller investigated in Germany and Australia, another Iranian papermiller works for Church, with magic mushrooms, big money from Turkey, corrections and retractions for Italian scholars, and finally, the many things one can do with francium.
Schneider Shorts 3.02.2023 – 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.
You know Voinnet, but now meet other great life scientists of Strasbourg: Drouard, Loeffler, Boutillier, Mr and Mrs Egly, and many others.
Former CNRS president Anne Peyroche has been symbolically sanctioned for research misconduct. Despite previous fraud findings, conclusions are not affected, and so is her employment by the Atomic Energy Commission. I present two more falsified figures.
Charbel Massaad is head of biomedical sciences at University of Paris Descartes. He even put forward his candidacy as rector, advocating for science ethics. Unironically.
Two and a half years after Maria Fousteri was found guilty of scientific misconduct by her former employer, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), exactly nothing at all happened. ERC and Molecular Cell ignored LUMC letters from June 2016, while Fouster’s British co-authors interfered to save own papers. Of 4 scheduled retractions, none took place.
The newspaper l’Express reported that Academie de Sciences commissioned an investigative report about the papers of former CNRS interim president Anne Peyroche, and that CNRS and the French Ministry of Research tried to suppress it. Peyroche herself could not be heard, because she is hospitalised since the affair started. So her co-authors took that as opportunity to blame Peyroche for every fake figure. Meanwhile, duplicated data was found even in Research Minister’s Frederique Vidal’s paper.
“The Committee concludes that serious breaches of scientific integrity have been committed by Dr. Fousteri while employed at the Leiden University Medical Center.”
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