Category: MDPI

Public attention to the use of animals in research is on the rise, and with good reason. As scientists, we have a responsibility to avoid using animals in our work whenever possible. Not only does this prevent needless suffering and waste of resources, it also leads to better science, because findings from animal experiments often fail to hold up in humans. If studies can be conducted ethically with human subjects, tissues, or organs, they should not use animals. 

On paper, some journals appear to clear this bar. In reality, however, they fall short of carrying out their ethical responsibility: We see many examples, especially in journals in the nutrition field, of published research that was conducted in animals but could have been carried out in humans or using human-relevant methods. 

For example, a recent study fed monkeys Western- and Mediterranean-style diets to produce information about the diets’ effects on human mood and behavior. Another experiment used pigs to evaluate how diets rich in fruits and vegetables can improve human microbiome health. 

This should give pause to the National Library of Medicine (NLM). When deciding if a journal merits inclusion in MEDLINE, the leading bibliographic database for life sciences, NLM may look at whether the journal’s ethical policies align with best practices and how well individual articles adhere to those policies. 

It took about five months, but a virology journal has retracted a paper on the microbe that causes COVID-19 after tagging it with an expression of concern back in December.

As we reported then, the paper, “SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,”  was a hit with vaccine skeptics who used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe.

The paper, which appeared in MDPI’s Viruses, generated enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. This Week in Virology, a podcast on, well, virology, devoted part of an episode of the show to deconstructing the findings. 

But as the journal noted last year: 

MDPI was about to publish a special issue in one of its journals to fete the career of a retired dean. But after Retraction Watch informed the co-editors of the issue that the researcher, Kishor Wasan, had abruptly retired after being found to have plagiarized a 2019 book review for The Lancet, the publisher evidently decided to cancel the planned celebration. 

The special issue of Pharmaceutics – here’s a Wayback Machine link – was to be “in honour of Professor Kishor M Wasan’s remarkable contributions to the pharmaceutics field.”

But now it is gone, and prompts a 404 error rather than any explanation.

A pair of authors have lost a 2020 paper claiming to link children’s vaccines to health and behavior problems after the journal concluded the data didn’t support the conclusions of the study. 

The authors of the paper, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” were James Lyons-Weiler, the president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, in Pittsburgh, and Paul Thomas, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore. 

The pair have published at least one other paper on vaccines, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, a periodical that seems dedicated to the proposition that immunizations, and not the diseases they prevent, are a scourge. (Check out the journal’s special edition on Covid-19, for example.)

Just days after adding an expression of concern to a paper published last week claiming that two people died from COVID-19 vaccinations for every three cases the vaccines prevented, the journal Vaccines has retracted the paper.

[See an update on this post, with more fallout from this case.]

As we have previously noted:

A preliminary study which found that using cold treatment worked to combat a Mediterranean species of fruit flies in blueberries has been retracted.

The study, “Cold Responses of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly Ceratitis capitata Wiedemann (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Blueberry” was published in Insects, an MDPI journal on May 1, 2020.

The retraction appears to be due to some kind of ethics breach, not the findings of the paper itself. It is unclear, however, what kind of ethics breach took place, and none of the authors has responded to requests for comment. The article’s URL in the journal doesn’t even show the abstract but at the time of this writing the full text is available (labeled as retracted) on PubMed. 

The retraction notice, dated June 9, 2020 reads:

Is too much irony even a thing? Let’s test the principle. 

The guest editor of a special issue on failures in public health and related projects has quit the effort because she and her colleagues couldn’t convince the journal to include more researchers from developing countries in the initiative.

In a blog post about the ill-fated venture, the “WASH Failures Team” — Dani Barrington, Esther Shaylor and Rebecca Sindall — describe their initial excitement, and subsequent dismay, as the International Journal of Environmental Research and Health, an MDPI title, first agreed to publish the special issue but then informed the team that it wanted to focus on first-world problems. 

Initially, all three women believed they would be responsible for the project, but the journal approved only Barrington for the guest editor post: 

The journal Magnetochemistry has retracted a 2019 article by a controversial researcher in New Zealand who argued that scientists are suppressing evidence that microwave radiation from smartphones and other devices cause harm to people. 

The paper was titled “Conflicts of interest and misleading statements in official reports about the health consequences of radiofrequency radiation and some new measurements of exposure levels.” In it, author Susan Pockett, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, argued that: 

A former emeritus professor who has been called “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists operating today” has had one of his papers subjected to an expression of concern.

Richard Lynn, who was stripped of his emeritus status at Ulster University last year after students there protested his views, published “Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence” in the MDPI journal Psych on April 24 of this year, after originally submitting it on April 1.

However, just four months later, the journal published an expression of concern about the paper. It begins with a seemingly innocuous premise, that the article is misclassified: