By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
“J. Hirsch. […] engaged in unscrupulous practices, including falsifying analyses and selectively presenting data to support unfounded claims. […] Hirsch’s tactics include manipulation of public opinion, personal attacks on our team members, and threats and complaints to our management and funding agencies.” – Mikhail Eremets, the single most highly regarded high pressure experimentalist today.
“I cannot help but wonder to what extent you will systematically scrutinize all publications from my group.” – Prof Dr Marino Zerial
Schneider Shorts 10 December 2021 – the incredible clinical partners of Cassava Sciences, Duke University expands quack operations, bullies bulling bullies at Max Planck Society, French COVID-19 suppository cancelled but we can target telomeres instead, plus there’s always oleandrin, Nature has a new joke journal, Norilsk, the most polluted place on Earth, and finally: why you must never refuse sex to mTOR man.
Somebody vandalised the “bed-to-bedside” research of the pulmonology professor Ralph Schermuly. His Giessen University appointed the best investigator they had to solve the case!
Who brought us COVID-19? The Neanderthals. The susceptibility to the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus, but also to diabetes, obesity, allergies, skin diseases, smoking and autism all happened because your great-[…]-great-grandfather could not keep his todger in his trousers many thousands of years ago.
The University of Münster in Germany shows with a good example how to act on evidence of data manipulation. Neuroscientist Andreas Püschel has been found guilty of research misconduct. It was once again about a paper authored by his former PhD student and now Luxembourg stem cell researcher, Jens Schwamborn.
Science communication by press release. No paper is published, no data available, but a Max Planck Institute director is eager to announce a possible cure for COVID-19: artemisia extracts, by his own company.
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.
Neanderthals colonised Europe and Middle East long before modern humans and went extinct less than 30,000 years ago, when our species has spread there. Their story inspired the fantasies of generation of scientists, some of whom still cannot accept the idea that Neanderthals were just another kind of humans very similar or maybe simply just like us. Even new age phrenology is paraded as scientific explanation to why Neanderthal died out.
Every academic will probably agree that plagiarism is wrong. It is absolutely not OK to pass someone’s else’s intellectual workContinue Reading
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