A biomedical journal has retracted a paper by a cancer researcher who sued her former institution over misconduct allegations. The action comes a decade after a sleuth first raised concerns about the article.
Former Ohio State researcher Flavia Pichiorri criticized how the publication, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, handled the dispute and said the journal suddenly pivoted away from its plan to republish the study with repeated experiments, a claim supported by correspondence seen by Retraction Watch.
In 2020, Ohio State University found Pichiorri, who worked in the lab of Carlo Croce, culpable for manipulating and reusing images in four publications, spanning from her time in Croce’s lab through establishing her own lab at Ohio State. Croce was cleared of direct misconduct, but OSU found serious management and oversight failures in his laboratory. Once a high-profile cancer researcher at Ohio State, Croce now has 18 retractions. He has filed several defamation lawsuits unsuccessfully, and reportedly owes his attorneys more than $1 million.
In its final report for Pichiorri’s case, the university recommended immediate retraction of two of her papers, including a 2013 article in JEM, and barred her from future employment at Ohio State.
On June 30, JEM retracted the paper for data falsification. According to the retraction notice, JEM was notified in 2021 that Ohio State had determined the “RNU6 data in the original Fig. 1, E and F, as well as in the corrected versions, were falsified.” Following a review, the editors decided to retract the article. The notice states JEM notified all authors for whom contact information could be found “but received no response.”
David Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University in Indiana, said he first contacted the journal in 2016 to report duplication issues in the paper and has pressed journal leaders steadily over the last 10 years to retract the problematic article. A correction was made to the work in 2017, and the journal issued an expression of concern in 2022.
Sanders told us that after the initial correction to the JEM paper, he contacted the journal to report new image duplication concerns. After many emails over the last decade, he wrote to the journal again in January after finding additional problems in the paper, including more duplication and images that could not have accurately represented the experimental conditions, he told us. Sanders said he was pleased the journal finally took action, but added the notice did not address all of the errors.
“The notice just says it was retracted for that original problem which occurred back in 2017,” Sanders told us. “It does not mention the new issues. This is typical. I’ve seen this in numerous cases, where if [the journal] feels they can say that it’s retracted for X, they don’t bother to mention issue Y.”
“Journals need to take these issues seriously in a timely fashion and address them correctly,” Sanders told us. “There was no need for this long a lapse before the article was retracted.”
Pichiorri, now an independent scientist, disagreed with the retraction and told us the journal overlooked evidence provided to editors that supported the paper’s data. All original manuscript data were independently verified by a forensic expert and submitted to the journal in 2017, Pichiorri told us.
At JEM’s request, the authors repeated experiments for figures 1E and F to demonstrate feasibility, including the RNAU6 element at the center of OSU’s concerns, Pichiorri said. In 2023, an executive editor told authors the paper would be retracted and replaced with a new article with the replacement figures and data from the repeat experiments, according to correspondence we’ve seen.
Pichiorri told us she was never contacted about the retraction, and the last correspondence she received from the journal was in 2023.
“Unfortunately, I have no insight into what occurred after that point,” Pichiorri told us. “The handling of this situation has not only been damaging to the authors but also to the research agencies that invested significant resources and validated the experiments associated with this publication.”
Pichiorri stands by the work, adding that “robust science is grounded in reproducibility,” and that to her knowledge, “the scientific conclusions of the manuscript have never been scientifically disputed.” She believes she was unfairly targeted by OSU, despite Croce’s senior authorship on two of the manuscripts investigated.
“OSU kept Dr. Croce working there and all the money associated with the grants they received because of his work and found two women that left the institution to use as scapegoats,” she told us.
Rory Williams, a spokesperson for Rockefeller University Press, told us after revisiting the paper’s expression of concern and further review, JEM “editors no longer had confidence in the data and decided to retract the article.” He declined to speak further about the process and would not address questions about why the journal changed course in its resolution.
Croce did not return a message seeking comment.
The other paper the university recommended be retracted was a Cancer Cell article that was removed in 2022. A correction was made to a third paper involved in the case. Pichiorri has two other retractions on papers she wrote with Croce.
Pichiorri sued the Ohio State Board of Trustees in April 2023, alleging the release of its misconduct findings to journals and to her new employer violated her due process rights, defamed her and inflicted emotional distress. An appellate court dismissed her legal challenge in December.
Ohio State University declined to comment.
Sanders, who has uncovered many research integrity issues over the years and was sued unsuccessfully by Croce, said the message to sleuths and whistleblowers is to keep pushing journals and publishers to correct faulty literature.
“It should not be the responsibility of the whistleblower to monitor the quality of the text of a correction,” Sanders said. ”But if you’ve requested one and want to have a thorough improvement to the scientific literature, then you really need to be following up on the corrections to make sure that the journal’s actions and statements address all the issues and accurately report the nature of the correction.”
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