In an unusual move, a German university has issued a statement calling into question “the scientific honesty” of a whistleblower, and suggesting that his emails were “dangerous.”
Some background: Off and on here at Retraction Watch, we have been following a complicated case involving Robert Nitsch, a scientist at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University. In August of last year, we reported on the retraction in the FASEB Journal of a paper on which Nitsch was a co-author. What made that retraction unusual was that it came after Charite – Universitatsmedizin Berlin, where Nitsch and some of his co-authors worked at the time, recommended a retraction even though the journal had originally agreed to a correction at the authors’ request. And a month later, we noted that Nitsch was a co-author on a Cell paper that was corrected for figure errors.
We became aware of the FASEB Journal retraction through Markus Kühbacher, who has been emailing us regularly about the case for about a year and a half. We knew from the cc: list that Kühbacher was emailing a number of people, and now Nitsch’s university has had enough, according to a letter they sent today to a number of scientists and journalists. Here it is in full: Continue reading German university calls whistleblower’s emails “dangerous”
A paper published online the other day in the Journal of Medical Ethics puts some numbers on an issue near and dear to Retraction Watch: How transparent are retraction notices when it comes to misconduct?
