By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
En-Bing Lin “has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, received over $535,000 in grant funding and given 74 external presentations, including 14 keynote speeches at international mathematic conferences.”
EU Commission gives €6 million to an obscure German start-up, promising to convert sewage to synthetic fuels. Internet sources suggest behind all this is “Professor” Ruggiero Santilli, the litigious “Florida Genius”, eternally self-appointed Nobel Prize candidate and sock-
puppeteering businessman. Exactly the kind of “fringe scientist” Smut Clyde likes to write about!
Cold Fusion is back, and EU Commission now funds it with €10 million. One project specifically builds on Fleischmann and Pons, the other is run by Italy’s most notorious Cold Fusion loon, Francesco Celani.
Lulea University of Technology is a dark and violent place, according to these victim accounts. Bullying, blackmail, sexual nepotism, robbery and even threats of physical violence and suicide are not unheard of. LTU leadership seems to be part of the problem, and money plays a role.
Lynn Kamerlin, Bas de Bruin and their colleagues have been the most vocal critics of Plan S from the very beginning, braving continuous opposition from certain OA leaders. Now that final Plan S guidelines were released, the chemists publish this Open Letter expressing their worry about a possible dystopian OA future.
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 trachea-transplanting company Videregen, based in Liverpool, got another £2 million grant from UK governmental agency Innovate UK, to advance their tracheal replacement technology.
A new Open Letter against Plan S appeared on the internet. Presently over 600 scientists are protesting against what they see as a bit totalitarian Open Access initiative by Robert-Jan Smits and his partners from Science Europe. Among the Open Letter signatories are many early career researchers and tenured academics, including two Nobelists.
I obtained a near-verbatim transcript of a video-conference Plan S architects Robert-Jan Smits and Science Europe president Marc Schiltz had on October 19th with Lynn Kamerin and other authors of the Appeal. It appears that Smits and Schiltz see the scientists and their scholarly societies as the reactionary elements blocking the road to the universal Open Access (OA).
A “defamation Complaint” was lodged with Google, against 6 of my articles and one cartoon. Each of them affects to some degree the British laryngologist Martin Birchall, professor at UCL and former close associate of scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. I also show that Birchall and UCL even now continue researching plastic tracheas on pigs, for future use in humans patients. This grant is presently funded by UK government.
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