Tag: politics

by Leonid Schneider November 13, 2018 14
Academic Publishing

Did Frontiers help Robert-Jan Smits design Plan S?

I obtained from the EU commission evidence that Smits was at least strongly influenced by Frontiers while designing Plan S. There were meetings with Kamila Markram and other Frontiers representatives, most notably on 25 April 2018, and a string of emails, where Smits requested and received “Frontiers feedback on the transition to OA and APCs”. Smits recently accepted the invitation as speaker next to Kamila, at a Frontiers-organised conference on 29 November 2018 in Brussels.

by Leonid Schneider October 29, 2018 16
Blog Research integrity

Olivier Voinnet, the new Dreyfus?

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?

by Leonid Schneider October 9, 2018 20
News Research integrity

Fraud proven in papers of former CNRS president Anne Peyroche

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.

by Leonid Schneider July 13, 2018 12
Lawyering-up medicine Open Letter

UCL trachea transplants: Videregen sets lawyers on Liverpool academics Murray and Levy

Videregen, the Liverpool-based company which bought the trachea regeneration patent from UCL, deployed lawyers against the academics Patricia Murray and Raphael Levy, precisely via their employer University of Liverpool. Main issue is the parliamentary submission by Levy and Murray, subject to absolute privilege. Yet Videregen also cites from the confidential notice of suspected research misconduct Murray and Levy submitted in good faith to UCL.