Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
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.
If you wish to report data irregularities, especially a recurrent pattern thereof, one is well adviced not to write toContinue Reading
The French scientific society CNRS, a huge country-wide network of research institutes and one of the most influential science institutionsContinue Reading
Regarding the Olivier Voinnet scandal and a recent data integrity case in Germany (marginally featuring a current group leader ofContinue Reading
The Olivier Voinnet scandal of almost two decades-long research misconduct and data manipulations has reached its logical conclusion. The FrenchContinue Reading
The hammer has fallen. The lab of misconduct-tainted plant scientist Patrice Dunoyer at the CNRS Institut de Biologie Moléculaire desContinue Reading
There is a popular saying: “A fish stinks from the head down”. This is what the situation starts to lookContinue Reading
Susana Rivas, a CNRS research group leader from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Toulouse is nowContinue Reading
