Tag: microbiology

Editor sacked over rejection rate: “not inline with Frontiers core principles”

Editor sacked over rejection rate: “not inline with Frontiers core principles”

Frontiers, the Switzerland-based publishing company run by EPFL professor and brain simulant Henry Markram and his wife Kamila and owned by the German giant Holtzbrinck and some investors, describes itself as “a community-rooted, open-access academic publisher”, and as such it boasts a ~71,000 head strong “virtual editorial office” which is bigger than the number of all Frontiers articles published since its inception in 2007 (~65,000). This communal character however doesn’t mean that the editorial board the size of a large town is invited to have any actual influence over editorial policies at Frontiers (which fits into one open-space office in Lausanne). In fact, the following guest post by Regina-Michaela Wittich, a former senior editor of a Frontiers journal narrates how she was sacked by Frontiers because she rejected too many papers for being of insufficient scientific quality, instead of sending them into the “rigorous” Frontiers peer review process (allegedly “enhanced with artificial intelligence”) where rejection becomes quite unlikely, and reviewers are sometimes reminded of their duty to be constructive. Continue reading “Editor sacked over rejection rate: “not inline with Frontiers core principles”” →

The PubPeer Stars of Weizmann Institute

The PubPeer Stars of Weizmann Institute

Journals generally avoid acting on data manipulation, unless forced to by investigations from universities and research institutions. The Lancet‘s current stance on Macchiarini (and previously Wakefield) affair is probably the most dangerous example. Practically at every single research integrity conference (which are usually organised by major publishers like Elsevier), publishing executives preach that journals should never be asked to deal with data manipulations in papers they publish,  but only respond to the final results of institutional investigations.

Actually, even there journals prefer not to retract as requested, as Science did in the case of Olivier Voinnet. On the other hand, some publishers are ready to forgive all misconduct when a unrepentant cheater offers them a new hot paper. Nature Publishing group, EMBO Press and even the publisher lobby group COPE recently protested against journals’ cheater blacklists, in connection with the data-faking plant researcher Patrice Dunoyer, a past Voinnet associate (his story here). And some journals even openly take the side of cheater scientists, while attacking PubPeer whistleblowers, as F1000 Research seemingly did, see tweet below.

Scholarly journals mostly act like grocery shops, which despite better knowledge refuse to remove contaminated foods off the shelves until manufacturer’s official recall, regardless of how many glass shards were found inside. It therefore lies in the hands of research institutions when fraud and cheating continue unabated, while research community is fooled and robbed, left alone with futile attempts to reproduce dishonest papers full of secret data manipulations. Yet this is exactly what Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel is good at:

The Art of Not Investigating

The following article lists Weizmann scientists with some serious evidence on PubPeer against the trustworthiness of their research. Before this elite institution from Rehovot, that most famous biomedical research centre in Israel, dismisses my article as anti-Semitic slander of an obscure German Nazi blogger, they should first try it with declaring me an assimilation-corrupted, self-hating diaspora Jew. Continue reading “The PubPeer Stars of Weizmann Institute” →

Ryan’s mentor Dow pretends copyright to combat my reporting

Ryan’s mentor Dow pretends copyright to combat my reporting

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” →

The mysterious public career execution of Robert Ryan

The mysterious public career execution of Robert Ryan

On August 24th I received an anonymous email over my website from a „Concerned Microbiologist”:

“I would like to bring the following to your attention on Robert P Ryan at the University of Dundee. https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Robert+P.+Ryan
He holds several high profile research grants and has won several awards. He is under investigation at the University of Dundee.
He has also featured in articles signing his praises in terms of his research achievements.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/university-of-dundee-s-rising-science-stars-1-3932042”

Only days after, on August 28th, big news broke out in Scottish and Irish media. The Scotsman brought the headline: “Leading scientist suspended amid ‘research misconduct’ investigation”.  The newspaper then indicated that Ryan has to answer for suspected image manipulations in his papers:

“It is alleged he used identical images across multiple papers, claiming they were different strains. In some cases, it is alleged the evidence was flipped or rotated, which could indicate an “intent to deceive”, according to one source. The extent of the alleged misconduct is unclear, but the source indicated it is alleged to have spanned “a number of years” and involved numerous prestigious journals”.

Similar reports appeared on the same day in The Irish Times, The Courier and Herald Scotland, the latter also wrote:

“It is understood his research group at the university has been dissolved, with PhD students and staff scientists reallocated elsewhere while a formal investigation takes place”.

Continue reading “The mysterious public career execution of Robert Ryan” →