Kate Travis

Exclusive: U.S. federal research integrity teams take hits with departures

Amid efforts by the Trump administration to “put an end to fraudulent and wasteful spending” and “enhance” accountability, two key offices charged with investigating fraud and holding scientists and institutions accountable for federal spending have seen top leadership depart.

At the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), the changes start at the top: Inspector General Allison Lerner is departing, and Megan Wallace, currently assistant inspector general for investigations at NSF, will become the acting inspector general, effective March 1.

Deputy Inspector General Ken Chason is also departing. The acting deputy will be Catherine DelPrete, who is NSF’s general counsel to NSF’s inspector general, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The changes were confirmed by Nadine Lymn, communications director of the National Science Board, which appoints and supervises NSF’s inspector general.

Meanwhile, Retraction Watch has learned that most — if not all — research investigators at the National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will also be leaving their jobs.

Springer Nature retracted 2,923 papers last year

The 3,000+ journals in the Springer Nature portfolio published over 482,000 articles in 2024, according to data published this week on a new research integrity page on the company’s website. The page also shares a data point you don’t typically get from publishers: 2,923 articles were retracted.

The numbers are a small part of the page, which outlines the tools the publisher uses for quality control, what prompts a research integrity investigation, and what happens during such investigations.

The publisher breaks down the retraction numbers a little more:

ICYMI: Second paper by Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof retracted

A 2017 paper coauthored by Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof has been retracted.

The article, “Conditional Deletion of All Neurexins Defines Diversity of Essential Synaptic Organizer Functions for Neurexins,” was published in Neuron in May 2017 and has been cited 145 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, issued February 11, states:

We, the authors of this publication, have decided to retract the paper because we found that the images in Figure 1D and Figure S4B contain aberrations that cannot be explained, and the original data for these figures are missing. Raw data for the other components of the paper are available, and their reanalysis confirmed the conclusions of the paper. We would like to thank M. Schrag for bringing these image aberrations to our attention.

ICYMI: Science editor encourages addressing integrity questions publicly

When scientists face critique of their published work, they should be proactive in responding to the issues and to questions about it from the public and the media, says Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in an editorial in the Feb. 14 Science.

“In an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny,” writes Thorp and coauthor Meagan Phelan, communications director for Science. “For better or worse, journalists, social media professionals, and the public may take a response of ‘no comment’ as a concession that the critics are correct, so forthright communication about research questions is more urgent than ever.”

ICYMI: Science is considering retracting ‘arsenic life’ paper

Felisa Wolfe-Simon at Mono Lake in 2010 (photo by Henry Bortman)

Science is finally considering retracting a 2010 paper claiming the discovery of a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its chemical makeup. “We feel the best thing to do would be to retract the paper,” the journal’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp told the New York Times in an article published Tuesday.

The article follows up with Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author of the work who withdrew from science and public life after the intense spotlight from the work’s initial splash led to damaging criticism. She has recently gone back to the lab and in 2024 received a NASA exobiology grant.

Retraction Watch readers may recall that Science published numerous technical comments and two studies refuting the original work. In 2012, David Sanders — who would later become well-known as a sleuth — said in our pages that the “only responsible action on the part of Science would be to retract the original article.” He called again for the retraction in 2021.

Researcher removed from journal masthead, loses three more papers

A management journal has removed from its masthead an editor who was the subject of a Retraction Watch post last month.

Shalini Srivastava, a professor at the Jaipuria Institute of Management in India, was an associate editor at Employee Relations, an Emerald Publishing title. We reported last month that two articles she coauthored — one in Employee Relations and another in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, also an Emerald journal — were retracted because “a large portion of this article’s models, samples, and results are taken, without full and proper attribution, from” earlier work, both retraction notices read.

Following our report, Srivastava’s name disappeared from the editorial team page of Employee Relations. Asked to comment on the change, a spokesperson from Emerald’s research integrity department replied:

Pair of management papers retracted for similarities to earlier work

Two management journals from the same publisher have retracted a pair of articles for taking “models, samples, and results” from each other and earlier work.

A tip from an anonymous account sent in November to Retraction Watch, sleuth Elisabeth Bik, and others called out duplications in the papers. Bik then posted the two articles on PubPeer in November 2024, noting several identical sets of tables between the papers, despite the works investigating survey data on different topics from different populations — intention to leave among employees from the hospitality sector, and resistance to change among managers at private organizations.

Biotech company agrees to pay $4 million to settle data falsification allegations

A biotech company whose CEO faced allegations of manipulating data in papers used in NIH grant applications will pay a settlement of $4 million to resolve those allegations, the Department of Justice announced January 6.

The settlement is the latest installment in a series of allegations surrounding research by Leen Kawas, the former CEO of the company, Bothell, Wash.-based Athira Pharma. In October 2021, four months after placing cofounder and then-CEO Kawas on leave, an internal investigation found she falsified images in her doctoral dissertation and at least four research papers.

But concerns had been raised about the images as early as 2016, and Athira failed to report them, the DOJ statement noted. Those papers “were referenced in several grant applications submitted to NIH, including in a grant that NIH funded in 2019,” the statement continued.

Elsevier denies AI use in response to evolution journal board resignations

The publisher of the Journal of Human Evolution says it does not use artificial intelligence in its production process, contrary to a statement issued last month by the journal’s editorial board when all but one member of the group resigned.

The statement, shared on X on December 26, noted the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” were resigning because Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, “has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years.” Among the examples cited:

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