A journal has retracted a 22-year-old-paper whose first author is the integrity officer for the Committee on Publication Ethics over concerns about image editing that “would not be acceptable by modern standards of figure presentation.”
The 2003 paper, “A recombinant H1 histone based system for efficient delivery of nucleic acids,” was published in Elsevier’s Journal of Biotechnology and has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Sleuth Sholto David, who goes by the name “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer, raised concerns about the image in December 2023, pointing out a “[d]ark rectangle” that appeared to be “superimposed onto the image.”
Coauthor Andrea Cristani, a professor at the Imperial College of London in England, responded on forum the same month, noting he was “not involved in in [sic] performing the experiments I have asked the person who produced the data to provide an explanation [sic].”
The first author of the article, Iratxe Puebla, is the facilitation and integrity officer for COPE, an organization publishers and journals often turn to for retraction standards. She is also the director for DataCite’s Make Data Count, an initiative “focused on open research data assessment metrics,” according to its website. The 2003 paper listed her affiliation at the time as Imperial College London.
According to the retraction notice, Puebla agreed with the decision and conceded “there appears to be evidence of splicing.” The “step would have been taken with the intention of providing a clearer presentation of the findings,” the notice reads.
Puebla did not respond to our multiple requests for comment sent to her work email, or to a message on LinkedIn. COPE said they are “are not able to comment on specific cases without having a thorough understanding of the facts” and did not respond directly to our request for additional ways to contact Puebla.
Christoph Sensen, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biotechnology, told us concerns about the paper were raised in January 2024 by a reader and investigated internally. He requested the retraction after authors on the paper failed to produce original data and declined to re-perform the experiment, he said. In a March For Better Science post, Leonid Schneider said he had contacted Sensen with concerns about the paper. Sensen did not say whether David or Schneider were the first to contact the journal.
Sensen attributed the discovery to advances in image technology. When the paper appeared, “it was printed in 8 bit. Now we have 16 bit and 32 bit imagery,” he said, which revealed the black box with two gel bands.
Sensen suspected the researchers “took two gels, one was darker than the other and they just cut out a piece from one gel and blotted it into the other one with Photoshop.”
“Even after 20 years, these things may just surface now which were hidden from sight before,” Sensen told us.
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