Ellie Kincaid

Editors resign from Springer immunology journal to launch nonprofit title

Several top editors of the Journal of Clinical Immunology, a Springer Nature title, have jumped ship to start a new, nonprofit journal with Rockefeller University Press.

Jean-Laurent Casanova, the resigning coeditor-in-chief, told Retraction Watch the move followed pressure from Springer to publish more papers as the journal prepared to become fully open access.

Editors from more than 20 other journals have taken similar actions in the past couple of years, as Retraction Watch has logged. Reasons for the walkouts vary, but editors often cite publishers’ perceived focus on paper quantity over quality.

Mass resignations hit psychotherapy journal after publisher replaced editors

The majority of the editorial board of a top psychology journal have resigned en masse after the publisher replaced the journal’s editors without warning. Also departing are the honorary editor and statistical consultants.

The journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, is a Karger title and “the official journal of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine and the World Federation for Psychotherapy,” according to its website.

Christna Chap, head of editorial development for Karger, called the change in the journal’s leadership a “normal editorial transition” which “may have been misunderstood by some members of the community, leading them to criticize the journal and encourage others to do the same based on incorrect information.”

‘Foolish mistake’: Guest editor loses three articles published in his own special issues

An Elsevier journal has pulled three articles after the publisher determined an author had been “involved in the peer review and decision making” as managing guest editor of the special issues in which they appeared.

The author, botany researcher Vijay Kumar of Lovely Professional University in Punjab, India, told Retraction Watch his apparent involvement in assigning reviewers was “purely unintentional” and a “foolish mistake.”

Two of the articles appeared in a special issue section of the South African Journal of Botany in 2022. They were:

‘Still angry’: Chemist finds his name on a study he didn’t write

Last October, Martin McPhillie, a lecturer in organic chemistry at the UK’s University of Leeds, received an email alert from his institution about a new article bearing his name.

The article, “Docking Study of Licensed Non-Viral Drugs to Obtain Ebola Virus Inhibitors,” appeared in the Journal of Biochemical Technology, a title of Istanbul, Turkey-based Deniz Publication. The journal is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science database.

The study was within McPhillie’s area of expertise, and aligned with work he and the other listed coauthors had previously published. But he knew the new study wasn’t his.

Finland Publication Forum will downgrade hundreds of Frontiers and MDPI journals

A committee of scholars in Finland has decided to downgrade 271 journals from Frontiers and MDPI in their quality rating system, in a move that may discourage researchers from submitting manuscripts to the outlets.

Both publishers criticized the move, first reported in Times Higher Education, as lacking transparency and seeming to target fully open-access publishers.

Finland’s Publication Forum (JUFO) “is a rating and classification system to support the quality assessment of research output,” which factors into government funding for universities, according to its website. “The objective is to encourage Finnish scholars and researchers to publish their research outcomes in high-level domestic and foreign forums.”

EcoHealth Alliance retracts and replaces paper on potential origin of COVID-19 in bats

The authors of an influential but controversial 2020 paper on the activity of bat coronaviruses in China which proposed the animals as a “likely origin” for the virus that causes COVID-19 have retracted their work and republished a revised version of the analysis. They say their results and conclusions did not change.

The paper, “Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China,” appeared Aug. 25, 2020, in Nature Communications. It has been cited 154 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and by at least two international policy documents.

The authors are affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the New York City-based nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, which has come under intense scrutiny by members of the U.S. Congress and others. The U.S. government in May suspended funding for EcoHealth amid concerns the COVID-19 pandemic virus may have developed from research on which the nonprofit and Wuhan lab collaborated – a so-called “lab leak.” EcoHealth has denied the pandemic virus could have emerged from its work.

Journal that published viral study on black plastic removed from major index

Chemosphere, the Elsevier title which in September published an article on “unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in household items” such as black plastic cooking utensils, has been removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science index in its December update.

The article, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” received heavy international media coverage questioning whether we should all throw out our black plastic spatulas.

The authors corrected their calculations in a December 15 corrigendum, as reported by Ars Technica. The exposure was an order of magnitude lower than the safe daily reference dose, not approaching it, as they had initially reported, but “this calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors wrote in the notice.

Exclusive: Researcher who received settlement to leave University of Iowa won’t be starting new job

A cardiology researcher who left the University of Iowa with a six-figure settlement earlier this year won’t be starting the new job he’d lined up at the Providence VA Medical Center, Retraction Watch has learned.

Justyn Charon, a spokesperson for the Providence VA, previously told us the researcher, Kaikobad Irani, would begin his new position “around November.” When we followed up, Charon confirmed, “there is currently no plan for Dr. Irani to be employed by VA Providence.”

In the meantime, the University of Iowa in Iowa City has launched an investigation about the leak of a report regarding Irani to Retraction Watch that appears to be an attempt to identify the source of the document.

19 months and counting: Former Hindawi journal still hasn’t marked paper

A journal formerly published by Hindawi has yet to publish any sort of notice on a paper sleuths reported for containing duplicated images 1.5 years ago.

According to Kevin Patrick, the sleuth who contacted the publisher in mid-2023, the episode “might be a useful case study” of the issues facing Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021 and stopped using the brand name earlier this year after retracting thousands of papers and closing journals overrun by paper mills.

The article, “Resveratrol Derivative, Trans-3, 5, 4 ′-Trimethoxystilbene Sensitizes Osteosarcoma Cells to Apoptosis via ROS-Induced Caspases Activation,” appeared in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity in 2021. Clarivate removed the journal from its Web of Science index in March 2023 for failing to meet quality criteria.

In April 2023, Elisabeth Bik left a comment on PubPeer, noting “several figures in this paper look identical to figures in a 2019 paper by some of the same authors,” which had been retracted. “I could not find wording about e.g. a republication of part of that study, and the 2019 paper is not included in the references,” she wrote.

Science places expressions of concern on two articles as Toronto’s Sinai Health investigates

Science has issued expressions of concern for two articles from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.

The notices, and two more editor’s notes on Nature articles, follow PubPeer comments on several of Durocher’s papers pointing out potentially duplicated images, as described by ForBetterScience. Durocher has responded to many of the comments promising to look into the issues.

Besides his academic positions at Toronto and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, Durocher co-founded Repare Therapeutics, a biotech company with five ongoing clinical trials of potential treatments for cancer.

The two Science articles, “Mitosis inhibits DNA double-strand break repair to guard against telomere fusions” from 2014, and “Orchestration of the DNA-damage response by the RNF8 ubiquitin ligase,” from 2007, together have been cited nearly 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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