Send lawyers, Einstein and Maugham: Authors object to PLOS ONE retraction

Here’s a tale of a paper retracted because other articles published years later seemed to plagiarize it – and its unhappy authors, whose behavior the journal says hints at paper mill activity.

On January 16 of this year, Maria Zalm, a senior editor at PLOS ONE and team manager for publication ethics, asked the authors of a 2015 paper to respond to concerns about their work – which had been flagged on PubPeer the previous November – by February 6, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. After some apparent back and forth, Zalm wrote to the authors on March 6 to say the journal had decided to retract the article.

One of the authors, Ming Zhou, responded on March 13 – the deadline Zalm had set for the authors to indicate whether they agreed with the retraction. Zhou, formerly of Cleveland Clinic and now chair of pathology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said he was “seriously concerned” about the journal’s decision. He continued:

1.      In your decision, you mentioned that “In this case we consider that retraction is warranted due to concerns about results presented in Figures 2, 3, and 4.”

Please consider the fact that this article was received by the journal on 12/18/2014, several years earlier than the other two articles which plagiarized several images from our article (one was received on 2/1/02017, the other one on 3/26/2019).  We had no relationship with the authors of the other 2 publications. We are therefore the victim, rather than the perpetrators,  of the other two fraudulent publications. If this is the main reason to retract our article, this argument is flawed and has no legal grounds.

2.      In your decision, you also mentioned that “Furthermore, during our editorial assessment, this article was identified as one in a series of articles for which concerns about potential manipulation of the publication process, specifically, the journal has concerns about similarities with other submissions in article content and apparent reuse of images.”

Please provide evidence of this accusation. I am happy to review it  for me to make a final decision.

Zhou closed by saying he is “the Chair of the Pathology Department at a major academic medical center in US. I rigorously defend the academic integrity and in no way condone scientific misconduct in any shape and form. However, we need to excise [sic] clear and objective minds when tackling the fraudulent academic misconducts.”

The same day, co-corresponding author Hongquan Zhang, of Peking University Health Science Center in China, responded to Zalm, also objecting and quoting Albert Einstein and Somerset Maugham:

We all disagreed with and felt very angry with your intended retraction of this paper. We did not do anything wrong in this study. The paper was done in my lab with collaboration with the US team when Dr. Huiying He, a pathologist, was working in the States. However, your team’s decision was based on just some pictures in our paper that are similar to or the same with some pictures used in the later publications that were in fact published 3 or 4 years late than us. Could you and your team believed that we can pass across several years to copy somebody else’s work based on Albert Eistein’s [sic] theory of superluminal speed? As a matter of fact, it is somebody else who plagiarizes our published data, but not we copied someone’s. I, here, strongly suggest you carefully revisit the papers and rethink the fact, and finally make a precise decision on this matter. An improper decision will hurt our team, your team and the reputation of PLoS One, except the ones who plagiarize other’s work. By the way, we have reported this matter to our institutional ethics committee for being improper treatment by PLoS One on our paper. We will also report this to our law office to protect our right on this matter. I am sorry that I may write to you a little harsh at this moment. However, does someone can count on people who are improperly treated speaking softly as the US [sic] novelist Maugham advised? In addition, we also sent emails to the corresponding authors of the two papers that contained the similar or the same data with us. We asked them to show their original pictures. In fact, we have those original data in hand. To this end, I suggest a thorough investigation before you make a decision. It will be all clear in the end. We have attached supporting files in this email, in which we showed our pictures in comparison with the other two. We also showed our original data with high resolution. It is already early morning in Beijing I could not translate our attached files into English. I am sorry I just attached these files in Chinese, and if you would like to read them please use Google to translate or otherwise we can translate them for you later if you still interest in reading them.

Zalm responded the next day:

Regarding the concerns with this article, as indicated in the previous decision letter this article was identified as one of a group of multiple articles that are connected by concerns about image reuse; this group of also includes multiple articles published between 2013-2016. In addition to the concerns regarding overlap in the published figures, the publication ethics team has raised additional concerns, including concerns with the extend of panel overlap in the underlying data provided for editorial review (50+ instances of (partial) panel overlaps were detected), concerns with the western blots provided as underlying data (the data provided for review were not uncropped and were insufficient to resolve the concerns with the western blot data), and concerns with the peer-review this article received (involving both concerns regarding undeclared COIs and the quality of the peer-review the article received). The concerns that connect the group of articles are such that PLOS suspects systematic manipulation of the peer-review process, which is sometimes also referred to as “paper mill activity”. As indicated in the PLOS Ethical Publishing Practice policies, in cases of suspected systematic manipulation of the publication process, PLOS may choose not to disclose detailed information about our assessment and specific concerns. 

In light of these concerns, some of which apply across a series of articles and cannot be resolved through discussions or revisions that only address your article, PLOS has determined that a retraction of the article is warranted. We understand that you are disappointed and possibly frustrated by this outcome. As indicated earlier, we have updated the author statement to indicate that you disagree with the retraction decision. If this information is incorrect, please let us know no later than 18 March 2024. 

On March 18, Zhang again raised his objections, to no avail. The paper — which was cited three dozen times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science — was retracted April 2 with a notice that referred to it being tied to a group of nine articles “connected by concerns about image reuse.” Three of those papers had already been retracted by PLOS ONE.

The notice went on to state the concerns “affect Figs 2, 3, and 4,” noting similarities between various panels in those figures and two other articles, one published in 2018 in the Medical Science Monitor and one published in 2019 in Molecular Medicine Reports. 

The corresponding authors “stated they were unaware of the panel duplications,” according to the notice. “They provided data files to support the results presented in this article but the files did not resolve the concerns.”

Zhang and co-corresponding author Huiying He, also of Peking University Health Science Center, once again objected in an email on April 3, calling the decision “typical bias and hegemony.” Zhou also told Retraction Watch he is unsatisfied, saying the “journal so far has not addressed our chief concerns raised in the corresponding authors’ letters.”

David Knutson, a spokesperson for PLOS, told us the decision “is tied to series-level issues involving a group of articles and which cannot be resolved by discussions at the individual article level.” He continued:

As is explained in the retraction notice, this article was identified as one of a group of ten articles published between 2013 and 2019 that are connected by concerns about image reuse. We note that pone.0124338 was published in 2015, and that the duplications mentioned in this article’s retraction notice were published in 2018 and 2019. However, our investigation into the linked articles found concerns that cast serious doubt on the integrity and reliability of all papers in this group. Thus, in accordance with guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and supported by our policy on Manipulation of the Publication Process, we retracted all four PLOS articles involved. In line with this PLOS policy, we will not disclose specific details as to the editorial concerns.

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