Retraction Watch

Federal U.S. judge tosses $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Elsevier

A district judge has ended a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier over a study about air purification technology after concluding the plaintiff’s evidence was too weak to take to trial.

Global Plasma Solutions, which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a paper in Building and Environment about the company’s needlepoint bipolar ionization technology. GPS claimed Elsevier was responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that led to “massive” financial losses for the company, according to its complaint. GPS, which now goes by GPS Air, claimed Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” but still published the paper.

On Oct. 22, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina tossed out the suit. Judge Kenneth Bell wrote in his order there was “insufficient evidence” for a jury to conclude Elsevier acted with malice. “Actual malice” requires a plaintiff to prove the alleged defamatory statement was made with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard,” which GPS could not support, according to Bell.

Game theory society yanks support for journal after Elsevier fails to renew EIC contract

The Game Theory Society is severing ties with one of its official journals. The move comes two months after the journal’s editors resigned because Elsevier failed to renew the contract for the journal’s editor-in-chief.

The society released a statement on October 9 announcing it will “withdraw its support for and end its association with” Games and Economic Behavior effective November 15.

“Our decision follows Elsevier’s decision not to renew Hervé Moulin’s contract and its subsequent search for new editors without the involvement of the existing editorial board,” the statement says. As we reported in August, Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, said the publisher “crossed a fundamental red line in the good faith agreement between the Editorial Board and the publisher” by not consulting with the editorial board regarding future editorial appointments. A spokesperson for Elsevier said the publisher asked the board members and Moulin for feedback but did not receive responses.

Another Sydney investigation of astrophysicist leads to retractions

A 2014 paper has been retracted following an investigation that concluded several of the figures, including those shown here, were “likely fabricated.”
*J.M. Schmidt et al./JGR: Space Physics 2014*

The University of Sydney has once again investigated the work of a former research fellow in its physics department, this time resulting in the retraction of two papers over concerns that data in several figures were likely fabricated.

In September, the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics retracted two articles by Joachim Schmidt, who was at the University of Sydney from 2010 to 2021.

As Retraction Watch reported in 2023, the university previously investigated work from Schmidt and his supervising professor, Iver Cairns. Researchers at the University of Michigan had raised concerns about a figure in a draft manuscript supposedly created using a simulation model developed by the Michigan team. Sydney’s investigation found Schmidt had used Adobe Photoshop to create or alter the images, which could not be reproduced by digital forensic experts or by Schimdt himself.

Weekend reads: Journals and the ‘Mathpocalypse’; autism paper earns EOC; Cell Press investigating bribery allegations

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Japanese institute finds materials researcher with 41 retractions guilty of ‘extensive’ manipulation
Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted
Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors
Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 800, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

A Wiley journal has corrected a retraction notice to clarify the author, a Princeton student, never conducted the study in the first place, as the student has gained publicity for visits to the offices of Texas Congressional delegation.

The paper, by Rishika Porandla, purportedly described a new way to break down polyvinyl chloride plastic by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering retracted the study this May after Porandla, an astrophysics student at Princeton who completed the study while in high school, notified editors of methodological errors in the work.

But following an Aug.10 Retraction Watch story highlighting Porandla’s decision to retract her own paper after she contacted us about her initiative to “correct the scientific record,” commenters on our site and on PubPeer raised doubts about whether the experiments described in the study were genuine. Porandla later told us she never conducted the experiments.

Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors

A tool developed to mine metadata and find past collaborations between handling editors and authors has turned up thousands of cases that breach journal policies on such relationships. *J. Di Scala et al/JCDL ’26*

Over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers from two publishers breach journal policies about past collaborations between handling editors and authors, a new analysis has found.

The work — presented October 15 at the 26th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Frisco, Texas — examined how often research studies published by journals run by the Public Library of Science and MPDI violate the publishers’ policies covering conflicts of interest.

PLOS requires that a handling editor of a manuscript and its authors haven’t coauthored papers together in the previous five years, while MDPI’s limit is three years.

To mine those relationships, Jules Di Scala, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, and his colleagues developed a tool called EditorCheck. It scans metadata files of published papers to collect the names of handling editors of each manuscript. It then searches the database Dimensions for any papers on which the handling editor and author were coauthors.

Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted

*An illustration of a cell secreting exosomes. Meletios Verras/iStock*

In a February 2018 editorial, Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon and the former president of the World Association of Medical Editors, blasted predatory journals for “the damage that these illegitimate open access journals do to the reputation of legitimate, credible ones.”

Two years later, he wrote about how his team at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, the journal he founded in 2013, had demonstrated to authors and readers that they had created a rigorous peer-review process and were “advancing patient safety and outcomes and elevating the science of plastic surgery globally.”

But an investigation by Retraction Watch raises questions about the way Rohrich, who is now editor emeritus at the journal, has promoted preliminary and sometimes misleading research about products to which he has financial ties. That includes exosomes, which are often derived from stem cells and have increasingly been touted — with limited evidence — for skin care, hair loss and wound healing.

Japanese institute finds materials researcher with 41 retractions guilty of ‘extensive’ manipulation

An investigation by a national research institute in Japan has concluded one of its former researchers fabricated and falsified figures in seven papers. Two publishers confirmed they are investigating the articles.

Joseph Raj Xavier, of Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in Chennai, India, has lost 10 other papers this year alone, according to the Retraction Watch Database. His total is currently 41 retractions, earning him a spot on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, found Xavier guilty of fabrication and falsification in “scanning electron microscope images, atomic force microscope images, and scanning electrochemical microscope images, among others,” according to a translation of an investigation report released September 29.

Weekend reads: Computer science conferences impose caps; Lancet strikes to continue; Is this the ‘mathocalypse’?

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale. And now it isn’t, following our story.
Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity
Former Crick Ph.D. student loses COVID vaccine paper for fabrication
Paper touted by MD Anderson gets expression of concern for data ‘concerns’
Journal retracts, republishes paper on Long COVID treatment trial

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

‘Springer’ agency website offering authorship for sale goes down following Retraction Watch story

A screenshot from the “Springer Journals Online” website before it went down on Friday.

The website for Springer Journals Online, an agency offering authorship slots in articles in exchange for payment, has gone offline, four days after Retraction Watch published its investigation into its activities.

As we reported on Monday, the agency was soliciting researchers offering services that included securing authorship in research articles intended for journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, among others.

Springer Journals Online did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email asking why the website was unavailable, if it had halted operations, or if it wished to address our previous story. No one answered calls made via WhatsApp.

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