Category: Fazlul Sarkar

Last month, we reported that a Wayne State University cancer researcher had threatened legal action involving post-publication peer review site PubPeer, claiming that he had lost a job offer from the University of Mississippi because of comments on the site.

Fazlul Sarkar — who has received $12.8 million in NIH funding and has been an investigator on five clinical trials — has now filed suit against PubPeer’s anonymous commenters, and has demanded that PubPeer release their names and identifying information. The complaint, filed by attorney Nicholas Roumel in Michigan’s Wayne County Circuit Court and which we’ve made available here, details more of the history of the case and of course describes the legal strategy, which we’ll describe below. Continue reading Scientist sues PubPeer commenters, subpoenas site for names

Last month, PubPeer announced that a scientist had threatened to sue the site for defamation. At the time, all PubPeer would say was that the “prospective plaintiff” is a US researcher” who was “aggrieved at the treatment his papers are getting on our site.”

Today, PubPeer revealed the that the prospective plaintiff was Fazlul Sarkar, a distinguished professor of pathology at Wayne State University in Detroit. Sarkar’s attorney, Nicholas Roumel, tells us that Sarkar had a job offer from the University of Mississippi, which rescinded it after seeing comments about his work on PubPeer.

We asked to see the letter rescinding the offer, but Roumel said he couldn’t send it because he and Sarkar are “in the process of making a claim against them.”

We also asked if there was an investigation into Sarkar’s work. Roumel told us:

As for any investigation, federal regulations make such things strictly confidential, so I can’t comment either way.

According to a post on PubPeer: Continue reading Scientist threatening to sue PubPeer claims he lost a job offer because of comments