Category: Legal Threats

Plagiarism spat over scientific poster prep advice escalates to legal threats

scientific-poster-300x224Colin Purrington has developed something of a niche in the research world. While teaching evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College, Purrington began developing a how-to manual for putting together poster presentations for meetings — a pursuit that has earned him a little money and some attention.

The result is a website, Designing conference posters, that, by his reckoning, has received some 2 million hits over the years (actually, there was a previous iteration of the site called “Advice on designing scientific posters”).

Not surprisingly, Purrington, who has copyrighted the material on his site, likes to protect his intellectual property. According to Purrington‘s site:

Continue reading Plagiarism spat over scientific poster prep advice escalates to legal threats

Another correction for Rui Curi, whose legal threats helped force shutdown of Science Fraud site

joeThe Journal of Endocrinology has run a correction for a paper by Rui Curi, the Brazilian scientist whose lawyers threatened Science-Fraud.org after the site ran a number of posts critical of Curi’s work.

Here’s the notice for “Non-esterified fatty acids and human lymphocyte death: a mechanism that involves calcium release and oxidative stress”: Continue reading Another correction for Rui Curi, whose legal threats helped force shutdown of Science Fraud site

Author whose lawyers threatened Science Fraud corrects another paper

curi
Rui Curi

Rui Curi, the Brazilian scientist whose lawyers’ threats helped force the shutdown of Science-Fraud.org, has corrected another paper criticized by the site.

Here’s the correction for “Effects of moderate electrical stimulation on reactive species production by primary rat skeletal muscle cells: Cross-talk between superoxide and nitric oxide production,” in the Journal of Cellular Physiology: Continue reading Author whose lawyers threatened Science Fraud corrects another paper

Owner of Science Fraud site, suspended for legal threats, identifies himself, talks about next steps

Paul Brookes, via URMC
Paul Brookes, via URMC

One of the owners of the whistleblower site Science Fraud, which went dark yesterday in response to legal threats, has identified himself, and explained what happened.

In a post on his personal blog (since removed)* — give the whole post a read if it reappears — Paul Brookes, a scientist at the University of Rochester, gives the history: Continue reading Owner of Science Fraud site, suspended for legal threats, identifies himself, talks about next steps

Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting

As regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed, a number of sites have sprung up recently to examine — quite critically — papers that other scientists say are dodgy. There’s Abnormal Science, for example, which has not been updated since last February, and a Japanese whistleblower took to YouTube to demonstrate what was wrong with two dozen studies.

The people running these sites have provided a useful service, in that they often nudge journals along and lead to corrections and retractions. When they’ve pointed out issues with papers, we always try to link back to them for details.

But these sites can also have sharp elbows, particularly those that are anonymous, and one site launched last summer, Science Fraud, has drawn unwanted legal attention from scientists whose work has been questioned. Last month, the site earned its first cease-and-desist letter. Today, the site has suspended posts, and deactivated all of its older entries. Here’s the post announcing the move: Continue reading Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting

Updated: Slate retracts story on Glenn McGee and Celltex following lawsuit threats, as McGee resigns from company

Slate has retracted a story about controversial bioethicist Glenn McGee and his involvement with Celltex Therapeutics, a Texas-based company that says it extracts and banks stem cells from people’s fat. Where the story by University of Minnesota bioethicist Carl Elliott once appeared now sits this editor’s note: Continue reading Updated: Slate retracts story on Glenn McGee and Celltex following lawsuit threats, as McGee resigns from company

Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat

When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) — known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement.

As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published earlier this year because 1) the author, Laurence Cole, had failed to disclose a potential financial conflict of interest with a pregnancy test maker named Church & Dwight; and 2) the article lacked a “credible scientific reason given for conducting the study,” along with other flaws detailed in the notice. (As we wrote the other day, we wonder why those issues did not arise during the initial review of the manuscript — but more on that shortly.)

We’ve since learned that the journal’s move came after it received a sharply worded letter from a high-powered San Francisco lawyer demanding immediate retraction of the article on the grounds that it represented a “substantial” threat to the financial health of his client. That client? A maker of home pregnancy tests who is now in the process of suing the very firm that provided Cole with research funding he failed to disclose.

First, here’s what Cole,  the hormone expert at the University of New Mexico whose paper the journal retracted, said about why he didn’t disclose that funding: Continue reading Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat

Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats

The British Journal of Ophthalmology has retracted a 2006 paper which purported to show a link between drugs for erectile dysfunction and a rare form of sudden vision loss called non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy, more commonly known as “Viagra blindness.”

That wouldn’t be terribly interesting, except for this: One of the authors of the paper, a researcher at the University of Alabama named Gerald McGwin Jr., told us that the journal retracted the article because it had become a tool in a lawsuit involving Pfizer, which makes Viagra, and, presumably, men who’d developed blindness after taking the drug:

The article just became too much of a pain in the rear end. It became one of those things where we couldn’t provide all the relevant documentation [to the university, which had to provide records for attorneys]

Ultimately, however, McGwin said that the BJO pulled the plug on the paper.

It was really the journal’s decision to take it out of the literature.

The retraction notice is mute on the reason for the retraction of the blindness paper (and, so far, our requests for comment seem to have fallen on deaf ears). Here’s all it says: Continue reading Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats