The publisher Frontiers has issued a Statement of Concern about a paper denying that HIV causes AIDS, and has launched an investigation into how the paper was published in the first place.
A cardiology paper from China has been retracted because “permission to report these discussions was not sought nor obtained,” though it’s unclear what “the discussions” refers to. The person to whom the discussions are attributed to in the retraction, Ji Bingyang, is not an author on the paper, and none of his papers are cited in the retracted article.
Here at Retraction Watch, we don’t believe in the expression “TMI.” But this case features a level of detail we’re not sure we’ve seen before.
Acta Radiologica has pulled a 2012 article on breast cancer imaging for being a duplicate publication — a sin the retraction notice takes great pains to point out.
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 Sarkar’s attorney, Nicholas Roumel, tells us that Sarkar had a job offer from the University of Mississippi, which rescinded it after seeing comments about his work on PubPeer.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.
A chemical engineering paper published in February has been retracted for data and authorship problems.
According to the retraction notice, the authors’ institutions investigated and found that not only was the data not reproducible, but “not all co-authors on the manuscript were aware of or agreed to the content and scientific conclusions in the article.”
The publisher Frontiers has issued a Statement of Concern about a paper denying that HIV causes AIDS, and has launched an investigation into how the paper was published in the first place.
