Category: Legal Threats

Steven Trubow and Donald Morisky made a small fortune through a controversial company that licensed, often at what researchers thought were exorbitant rates, a tool to scientists, wielding the cudgel of costly legal action if they balked at payment. 

Now, in what critics of the pair will doubtless find a delicious irony, the pair is embroiled in a lawsuit over … licensing of the licensing business. 

Morisky, of UCLA, is the developer of the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), a proprietary research instrument he rents out to scholars and institutions — often at fees that have, in some cases, exceeded $100,000. Many researchers who don’t obtain permission have been forced to pay up or retract their work.

Continue reading Duo that used legal threats to force scientists to pay for a tool face off in court

The case of Jonathan Pruitt, a spider researcher suspected of fabricating data in potentially dozens of studies, keeps getting weirder. 

Pruitt, according to our count, now has six retractions. Currently associate professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he made a name for himself by providing other scientists with field data — much of which now appears to be unreliable. 

Among the latest developments in the case is a correction in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for a 2016 article titled “Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.” That followed this April expression of concern, which read: 

Continue reading Spider researcher uses legal threats, public records requests to prevent retractions

A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:

Continue reading Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist

Carlo Croce may be back in court again — but this time, as a defendant.

Last month, Croce lost a defamation suit he filed against David Sanders, a Purdue researcher who was quoted in a 2017 New York Times story about allegations regarding Croce’s work. Croce had already lost an appeal of a related suit against the Times.

It turns out that Croce had not paid his attorneys — Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, Ohio — in a number of those cases, to the tune of $923,445.51, according to a lawsuit filed against Croce last week in Franklin County Court.

Continue reading Law firm sues OSU cancer researcher for $900,000 in unpaid fees following failed libel suit

A Federal court in California has ruled in favor of the popular training program CrossFit in its lawsuit against a nonprofit group — a competitor in fitness training — awarding the workout company nearly $4 million in sanctions. 

Why are you reading about this case on Retraction Watch, you might ask? Well, at the heart of the suit, first filed in 2014, was a now-retracted 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research — published by the NSCA — showing, erroneously, that CrossFit was linked to an increased risk for injuries. The journal initially corrected the article, but as CrossFit noted, the publication never acknowledged fabrication of data. 

The senior author of that paper, Steven Devor, resigned his position at The Ohio State University after the retraction in mid-2017. As we reported at the time, the institution had demanded: 

Continue reading Crossfit wins $4 million sanction in lawsuit stemming from now-retracted paper

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has waged legal battles against those he feels have wronged him, has lost another of those fights.

A judge in Franklin County, Ohio, ruled against Croce in a case he brought against OSU to stop them from removing him as chair of his department. Croce had filed the suit late last year. Details are scant, but an order to terminate the case appeared in court records earlier this week.

An OSU spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

Continue reading Embattled cancer researcher loses legal bid to be reinstated as department chair at OSU

A pair of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are suing the Journal of Biological Chemistry for defamation after the publication retracted one of their papers for problematic images. 

Raju Reddy and Aravind Reddy Tarugu, who are not related, claim the JBC and its publisher, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, defamed them by retracting their 2014 paper on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 

Reddy is a visiting associate professor of medicine at Pitt and chief of pulmonology at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Aravind Targugu, also identified as Aravind T. Reddy, is employed by Pitt. 

According to the suit, filed in August and first reported by the The Pennsylvania Record, the researchers say the retraction “severely” harmed their reputations and caused:

Continue reading Pitt researchers sue journal for defamation following retraction

A journal is warning contributors that they should avoid using a controversial scale for assessing adherence to medication regimens or they might wind up wearing an omelette on their faces.

The chicken here, of course, is the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale. The instrument was developed by a UCLA professor named Donald Morisky, who with a colleague named Steve Trubow threatens to sue anyone who they believe misuses the tool after failing to obtain a license.

As we have detailed on this blog and in Science, many researchers report that Morisky and Trubow seem to set traps for them, ignoring their requests for a license then hammering them with demands for citations, money — often tens of thousands of dollars or more — or both once their work has been published. Failure to comply, the pair assert, could lead to a lawsuit. (Morisky sometimes fails to note his own financial conflict here, as he did in this 2017 paper in PLOS One touting the accuracy of his tool.) Continue reading Legal threats once again force corrections over a scale measuring medication usage