By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Schneider Shorts 16.06.2023 – an evaluation in Strasbourg finds a flyer, trash science from Rome, trash science from Harvard, cures for Long COVID and old age, with a baroque art sale, Latvian cooking recipes, informative Frontiers retractions, and finally, the mystery of who blew up the dam.
Schneider Shorts 10.03.2023 – two science bigwigs caught with unaffected conclusions, return of superconductive fraud in Nature, other examples of who’s trustworthy and who isn’t, what Stanford president knew, some retractions, MDPI fighting papermills, a German journal can’t stop papermilling, and finally, who blew up Nord Stream pipelines?
Charles-Henri Lecellier is about to get promoted to CNRS research director 2nd class. Time to dig up old stories and let the ghosts rise to wash their dirty laundry.
The Plant Cell is an elite journal, its authors and editors are some serious heavyweights whose labs cannot be associated with data manipulation.
Catherine Jessus resigned, Olivier Voinnet solves the crime he was suspected of, and their mutual investigator Francis-Andre Wollman might want to investigate his own papers
Much of French media and academia, and certainly also the international plant science community now debates a hot conspiracy theory: what if Olivier Voinnet is actually innocent, a visionary genius who fell prey to a conspiracy of fraudulent colleagues and scheming bureaucrats? I discuss here the widespread dishonesty and data manipulation among Voinnet’s co-authors and peers. Is French research culture to blame?
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.
Olivier Voinnet, responsible for probably the biggest fraud scandal in plant sciences, is back in the news. His present employer ETH Zürich has now concluded, in collaboration with CNRS, their second investigation into data manipulations in Voinnet papers. The ETH professor was declared innocent of any data manipulations, in the past, present and even future.
The Olivier Voinnet affair is now a distant past. Despite new evidence of manipulated data still popping up, journals drew a line. Especially the elite journal Nature Genetics, which may or may not have to do with their Editor-in-Chief Myles Axton having some strange data in his paper.
As Le Monde brought into public light the Catherine Jessus affair with its whitewashed data manipulation and the growing academic protest, a counter-revolution put its foot in. A signature list in the worst Stalinist tradition was published, organised by the very elite of French academia (mostly members of Academie de Sciences), and signed by hundreds, mostly professors and CNRS group leaders, including a former CNRS president. Their demands, endorsed in a secret press release by current CNRS president and Sorbonne University president: punishment for 10 anonymous authors of the Jessus counter-report and for a Le Monde journalist.
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