Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work

A group of researchers in France has lost a 2019 paper in Cell Calcium because one of the authors took, um, a bit too much inspiration for the work from a manuscript he’d reviewed for another publication. 

The article, “TRPV6 calcium channel regulation, downstream pathways, and therapeutic targeting in cancer,” was written by a team from the Laboratory of Excellence Ion Channel Science and Therapeutics at the University of Lille. The senior author of the paper was V’yacheslav Lehen’kyi.

Or, maybe it was John Stewart, of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. 

As the retraction notice states: 

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors in Chief.

This article was retracted because of inappropriate use of confidential material and text available to one of the authors through the review of “TRPV6 As A Target For Cancer Therapy”, John M Stewart, J. Cancer, online date 2019-5-13; doi:https://doi.org/10.7150/jca.31640.

According to the article information, Stewart submitted his manuscript on Nov. 11, 2018, and received an acceptance in early May of the following year. The Cell Calcium paper was published online in April 2019 and appeared in print last June. 

Shmuel Muallem, the editor of Cell Calcium, referred us to Monia Lodi, who oversees the journal for Elsevier. Lodi has not yet responded to our queries. 

‘Not an intentional theft’

Lehen’kyi sent us an extensive email (which we have uploaded here) in which he expressed his sorrow over the matter: 

I wish I could beg John Stewart’s pardon, at least that he knows that I appreciate very much his works, and what happened was not an intentional theft of me, though I don’t deny my responsibility of it. Indeed, I was the reviewer of his review in October 2018-February 2019 in J Cancer. It was an excellent review, extremely complete, I was really proud of being its reviewer. I did print it out and make my french students read it. I could never imagine myself that it could turn in such an awful story.

Lehen’kyi said his version: 

[is] not a copy-and-paste review of the John Stewart’s work as he might probably think. … What is really important for me that John Stewart has found justice for him and now, in one year (!) he has finally his review published and visible on the PubMed. You ask me whether my colleagues agree with the retraction? A head of the Laboratory, Prof Natalia Prevarskaya, she didn’t see the review until the problem arised, and my students, we don’t talk anymore about it since then because we want to forget this worst nightmare story.

And, he added: 

My lab colleague Charlotte has offered me a cup for this Christmas, on the orange cup it’s written in a big scale: “Shit happens”. That is exactly my case.

How it came to light

Stewart, who is chief scientific officer at Soricimed Biopharma, told us that:

I became alerted to a new publication in this field by a colleague who knew that I had just submitted a review manuscript to Journal of Cancer.  It was a pre-print in a special [issue] of Cell Calcium. I immediately read the document, with a dawning realization that I was reading words from the article I had just recently submitted to JoC.

Stewart said he immediately contacted the editors of each journal, supplying the purloined manuscript to Cell Calcium: 

It was easy to compare the two documents as whole sections were simply copied and pasted.

Stewart said he and the editor of the JoC decided to delay publication of his paper until the  plagiarized version had been retracted: 

I waited to make sure the retraction in Cell Calcium was ‘official’ to avoid any possibility of someone seeing my paper as being the one that was doing the copying.  

He added: 

I must admit that I am still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity of it.  

Sadly, we are not.

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