Category: Legal Threats

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. 

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:

A leading repository of social science which is owned by Elsevier has reposted an article it removed on New Year’s Day after the author was accused of defamation and the site was threatened with legal action if it didn’t remove the paper. 

The article in question was written by Ann Lipton, the associate dean for faculty research at Tulane University Law School and appeared on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). 

Titled “Capital Discrimination,” the paper – which has been accepted by the Houston Law Review – explores:

A journal has retracted a 2020 paper about looking for “suspicious activities” on the India-China border — including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons.”

The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, which alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed,” is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors: 

A neuroscientist once called the “prince of panspermia” has lost a lawsuit against Springer Nature stemming from a 2019 paper of his that a journal retracted.

Here’s the summary from United States District Judge John P. Cronan, who heard the original case:

A Stanford University professor who tried to sue a critic and the journal that published an unfavorable view of his work is opposing a judge’s order that he pay $75,000 in legal fees generated in the case. 

In 2017, Mark Jacobson, an engineer who studies energy at the California institution, sued Christopher Clack and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after the journal published an article which cast doubt on some of the conclusions in a 2015 paper Jacobson had written in PNAS. The amount of the defamation claim? $10 million from each of the two parties, plus punitive damages and “any and all relief.” 

Jacobson withdrew his lawsuit, which also demanded a retraction, in 2018, at which point Clack and the journal fired back. They filed their own suit grounded in the anti-SLAPP — short for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute, in which they asked for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.

A former veterinary student at Tufts University has settled a $1 million lawsuit alleging that she was punished for claiming that her mentor at the school falsified data in a 2014 article. 

In 2019, Kristy Meadows sued Tufts and two faculty members, Elizabeth Byrnes and Dean Joyce Knoll, whom she said retaliated against her for claiming that Byrnes cooked her results in an article Meadows and Byrnes published in Neuroscience titled “Sex- and age-specific differences in relaxin family peptide receptor expression within the hippocampus and amygdala in rats.” 

According to Law360, which first reported on the settlement: 

More than three and a half years after being alerted to concerns about the data in a 2015 article, an obstetrics journal has finally retracted the paper, citing a lack of ethics approval for the work. Meanwhile, the co-author of a meta-analysis that relies heavily on the paper has suggested that some critics of the underlying work risk legal action for their efforts.

The study, “Vaginal progesterone for prevention of preterm labor in asymptomatic twin pregnancies with sonographic short cervix: a randomized clinical trial of efficacy and safety,” appeared in Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics (AGO) and was conducted by Waleed El-refaie, Mohamed S. Abdelhafez and Ahmed Badawy, of the University of Mansoura in Egypt. The article has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

As we reported last October, data sleuths have accused Badawy and some of his colleagues at Mansoura of having fabricated data and other misconduct in some 250 clinical trials — charges which were (and may still be) apparently convincing enough to warrant a university inquiry.