Category: Legal Threats

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. 

Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the name David Sanders. Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University, has become a scientific sleuth, ferreting out problems in numerous papers. In one of those cases, that of Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce, Sanders ended up being sued — before an article in which he was quoted even came out. He eventually prevailed, but the episode left a mark, as readers will learn in this Q&A. (It has left a mark on Croce, too, in the form of 10 retractions and two suits brought by teams of lawyers for unpaid bills.)

Retraction Watch (RW): Carlo Croce sued you in 2017. Why?

A drug company that manufactures a painkiller used for surgery patients has sued an anesthesiology journal along with its editor and publisher and the authors of articles that it says denigrated its product unfairly.

In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Pacira Biosciences claims that “In the February 2021 issue of Anesthesiology, the ASA, reflecting a bias against EXPAREL amongst the editorial staff at Anesthesiology, published three articles, and other related content, that seriously disparage Pacira’s product EXPAREL,” an FDA-approved drug which they say is “a non-opioid pain medication proven to prolong post-surgery pain relief.” 

In seeking retractions, compensatory and punitive damages exceeding $75,000 — the threshold for U.S. federal court — and lawyers’ fees, the company’s attorneys at Latham & Watkins write:

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has had 10 papers retracted and at least as many subject to corrections or expressions of concern, has lost another court appeal.

Croce brought the case against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017 for statements that Sanders had made in stories in The New York Times and Lafayette Journal Courier. Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, ruled against Croce in the case last year. Croce filed an appeal, and yesterday three judges in the Sixth Circuit of Appeals upheld the earlier ruling.

The judges note: