Legal Threats – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

Scientist sues publisher to block expression of concern

A gastroenterology researcher has sued a scientific journal to stop it from publishing an expression of concern for one of her papers.

Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., is the middle author of “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018. The article has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

We previously reported that the corresponding author of the paper, Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Edwards School and chair of its department of clinical and translational science, told us he had contacted PLOS to request a correction to the article.

Judge orders cancer researcher’s art collection seized to pay fees from failed libel suit

The sheriff of Franklin County, Ohio, has received an order to seize and sell property of Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, to pay his nearly $1.1 million debt to lawyers who represented him in failed libel and defamation suits.

Last December, a judge ordered Croce to pay $1,098,642.80, plus interest, to Kegler Brown Hill & Ritter, which was one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

He lost both cases, and the firm sued him for $900,000 in unpaid fees. Croce also lost a suit against Ohio State in which he sought to regain his post as chair of his department after the university removed him.

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

In unusual move, publishers remove authors victimized by forger

Three major publishers have removed several authors’ names from five papers, most published a decade ago, following correspondence from an attorney representing one of the individuals.

Three of the papers appeared in PLOS ONE in 2013, one appeared in Springer Nature’s Tumor Biology the same year, and one appeared in Elsevier’s Obesity Research & Clinical Practice in 2014. As we reported in 2016, the journals retracted the articles because one of the authors – Lishan Wang – had forged the rest of his co-authors’ names and manipulated the peer review process.

Years later, Yongyong Shi, a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Bio-X Institutes and one of the authors whose name Wang forged, hired a lawyer named Joseph Lewin, a solicitor with Dorsey & Whitney (Europe) LLP. Lewin, in turn, requested that the three publishers remove Shi’s name from the original papers.

Judge orders OSU cancer researcher to pay $1 million to lawyers from failed libel suit

Lawyers who represented Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, in failed libel and defamation suits – and who later sued him for not paying his tab – have won a judgment for $1 million against the scientist.

The judgment, dated Dec. 8, 2022, orders Croce to pay just shy of $1.1 million plus interest to Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., both of which he lost.

The firm sued Croce in 2020, seeking more than $920,000 in unpaid fees. After the case went to trial, a jury awarded the full amount to the firm in damages, and the judge ruled that the lawyers were entitled to prejudgment interest at a rate of 4%, totaling an additional $175,000. The judgment amount can continue accruing interest, and Croce is responsible for the court costs.

In his post-trial decision, judge Richard A. Frye wrote:

University to investigate adjunct professor after allegations of plagiarism – and legal threats

The University of Zurich in Switzerland has announced that it will open an investigation into an adjunct professor alleged to have taken images and other material from a popular blog on medieval manuscripts and published them in her book without attribution.

The news, first reported by kath.ch, follows an eyebrow-raising exchange between the researcher who discovered his work had been used without citation and someone claiming to be the professor’s secretary, who told him, “nobody cares about your blog!”

The professor, Carla Rossi, is also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, abbreviated as RECEPTIO. The center operates an academic press that published Rossi’s 2022 work, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method.

The book describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.

Article that critiqued high-profile abortion study retracted

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings,” was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies “to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” according to its website.

Scientist goes to court to clear his name after fake peer review retractions

A scientist who lost 11 papers for fake peer review and other reasons went to court to pin the misconduct on a coauthor – and received a favorable judgment.

The retractions for Aram Mokarizadeh, a biomedical researcher previously affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, were part of a batch of 58 papers in seven journals that Springer and BioMed Central pulled in 2016 after an investigation found “evidence of plagiarism, peer review and authorship manipulation, suggestive of attempts to subvert the peer review and publication system to inappropriately obtain or allocate authorship.”

After our story on the case appeared, Mokarizadeh told us that a coauthor was “responsible for all problems associated with retraction,” and that he had brought a case to court in Iran to prove it.

Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids

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Stephen Barrett, a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch, makes a point of calling out homeopathy and other health products and practices that lack evidence.

In that vein, earlier this year he emailed the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery to critique a 2019 article by Walter Tatch titled “Opioid Prescribing Can Be Reduced in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice,” which has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million but then dropped the case, is appealing a recent court order that he pay the journal’s publisher more than $400,000 in legal fees. Those fees are based on an anti-SLAPP statute, “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

As we have previously reported, Jacobson:

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