The academic career of the Irish microbiologist Robert Ryan is apparently over. Following an internal misconduct investigation at the University of Dundee, Ryan had to resign from his position as group leader and lost the prestigious funding from the Wellcome Trust. Prior to this, he was suspended by his employer, while the European molecular biology society EMBO terminated his participation in the EMBO Young Investigator programme. Peculiarly, there never were any press releases or official communications. The University of Dundee apparently chose instead to leak internal emails to media (for details see my reporting here and here), the most recent announcement about Ryan’s “resignation” was no exception.
Ryan’s however is not the only name crowning all those papers now under suspicion of misconduct. Another recurrent name belongs to his former mentor of many years, the leading plant pathogen researcher Maxwell Dow, from the University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland. The PubPeer evidence is quite heavy against Ryan and Dow papers, and in fact UCC once suggested to me that they would initiate an investigation. Other media never even mentioned Dow’s name. Only on my site was his most obvious responsibility for Ryan’s research discussed, nowhere else. Now Dow decided to act against this unwelcome reporting. He submitted a DMCA takedown request to my website host WordPress and LinkedIn’s Slideshare, targeting my article and my teaching presentation from a research integrity workshop in Catania, Italy. Dow’s copyright claim concerned a photograph of his together with Ryan which was made publicly available by their university in this UCC press release. Continue reading “Ryan’s mentor Dow pretends copyright to combat my reporting”
