Former Italian university head faces retractions and criminal investigations

A prominent Italian pharmacologist under investigation for embezzlement and rigging university contracts has garnered a dozen and a half retractions in the last year for image alterations and duplications.

But Salvatore Cuzzocrea, the former rector of the University of Messina, told us he did not agree with the retractions because they were decided “without clear communication,” and that none of the papers had problems that he wasn’t able to reply to. 

Cuzzocrea, a professor of pharmacology at Messina, is set to face an Italian court over rigging bids for university contracts and is under investigation for allegedly embezzling more than 2 million euros worth of reimbursements. 

Cuzzocrea said he has had “very few” publications corrected and retracted: “I’m saying ‘very few’ because I published more than 900 papers, and I have only 70 with some problem, and only eight or nine were retracted.”

In reality, 18 of his papers have been retracted since January last year, and 179 have been flagged on PubPeer. Critics have pointed to image overlap, manipulation, and duplication across multiple articles. So far, the issues raised span papers published over the past three decades. 

For example, in a 1999 paper published in the Journal of Pineal Research, a figure purporting to show “COX-2 staining” had also been used in a paper published the same year in the European Journal of Pharmacology to show “nitrotyrosine staining.” An anonymous commenter on PubPeer spotted the discrepancy in June 2023. 

According to the retraction notice from the Journal of Pineal Research, the data Cuzzocrea sent to the editors at their request “was insufficient to address the concerns.” The journal said it had “lost trust in the accuracy and integrity of the overall body of data presented in the article and consider its conclusions invalid.”

The article in the European Journal of Pharmacology, also flagged on PubPeer, appears to contain additional problems, including spliced images in Western blots and duplication of lanes from unrelated studies. One lane appears to be reproduced from a 1998 paper in Immunology;  other images show cells that seem to be duplicated from a different investigation published two years earlier, according to the anonymous data sleuth on PubPeer. 

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the European Journal of Pharmacology, said: “We are aware of the allegations made against Cuzzocrea and an investigation is currently ongoing.”

In several of Cuzzocrea’s retractions, the notices state journal editors engaged with the authors, but the explanations fell short of addressing their concerns. 

When asked why he thought the editors deemed the explanations “insufficient,” Cuzzocrea told us spotting duplications was harder 20 years ago. When he received draft manuscripts as senior author of the publications, he said, he didn’t remember the same images from three months or a year before. “If a postdoc, or a guy from another department made a picture from the same slide,” he said, “how can I understand? Especially because we don’t have, at that stage, artificial intelligence that can help us.” 

In two other retractions, both for papers published in 2009 in the British Journal of Pharmacology, the editors found the data had appeared elsewhere in a “different scientific context.” However, because of the time since publication, the authors were “unable to retrieve the full set of original data, and the data provided was found insufficient to address the concerns.” 

Cuzzocrea referred us to guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics that encourage investigators to retain data for only 10 years following publication. But according to the COPE Guidelines for Good Publication Practice, a principal investigator’s responsibility for long term retention of data “may be up to 15 years.” (Guidance from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommends 10 years for medical publications.)

Of the 150-plus papers flagged on PubPeer, Cuzzocrea has personally responded to comments on two. “I don’t like people that don’t show their face,” Cuzzocrea said of PubPeer. “I don’t trust this website.” 

In one post, he agreed his lab flipped an image, and said he requested a correction to be issued (none has yet appeared).  In another, he responded at length to an anonymous comment that a 2004 article in Critical Care Medicine contained the same micrograph as one published two years earlier in Molecular Pharmacology, despite describing different experimental conditions. In this response, he partly attributed the problem to a histologist involved in both studies, and stated he had contacted the journal to correct the images. None appears to have been issued. 

“The question is, if we have nine authors in the publication, why is it my fault?” he told us. “I didn’t publish by myself, I submitted the manuscripts, the manuscript goes through a peer review process, maybe that in one journal was rejected, and then I sent to another one, and then to another one, maybe it was seen by seven referees, and three editors. At the end, it was published, nobody saw the problem for 20 years?”

 Cuzzocrea admitted problems “could be possible” in the papers: “I’m not saying that I’m perfect. But if you take the fact that there are retracted papers in Nature, Science, in top journals, it means it was not possible for senior authors to understand, to look at everything.” 

Seven of Cuzzocrea’s intact articles flagged on PubPeer appear in the FASEB Journal. Darla Henderson, FASEB Publications’ research integrity officer, said the journal has looked at all seven of the papers and four “have been through our full process with corrections issued, sometimes with images included,” she said. “The other 3 cases remain open, and we are following COPE processes and guidelines.”

In October 2023, Cuzzocrea resigned from his position as rector of the University of Messina, and also from his presidency at the Conference of Italian University Rectors. “There was a sort of newspaper attack,” he told us.“And I decided to defend myself.” 

 Around that time, news broke that Cuzzocrea was under investigation by the Italian Prosecutor’s Office following an audit request to several regional authorities from another Italian university leader. Italian scientist and pseudonymous sleuth Aneurus Inconstans reported on the resignation at the time. The investigation centers on more than 2 million euros in reimbursements tied to Cuzzocrea. According to local media reports, the reimbursements were purportedly used to cover research materials, and amounted to about 40,000 euros per month. He said he resigned as “a sort of respect for the institution,” not because he thought he did anything wrong. Cuzzocrea is also now facing a trial for allegedly awarding contracts without a contract selection process.. 

Cuzzocrea is still a professor of pharmacology at the university, and as of last year, was appointed as an advisor to the Italian Ministry of University and Research by the minister. 

He is also among the Italian researchers included in the Top Italian Scientists Journal, a publication that started last January. As Aneurus Inconstans reported, the journal includes researchers in the country who have a h-index – a measure of research performance – higher than 30. Cuzzocrea is on the editorial board of the journal, and is named as a “Top Italian Scientist” in biomedical sciences. 

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