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Anonymous Peer-review Comments May Spark Legal Battle
sciencehabit writes: The power of anonymous comments — and the liability of those who make them — is at the heart of a possible legal battle embroiling PubPeer, an online forum launched in October 2012 for anonymous, postpublication peer review. A researcher who claims that comments on PubPeer caused him to lose a tenured faculty job offer now intends to press legal charges against the person or people behind these posts — provided he can uncover their identities, his lawyer says.
A list of his articles on PubPeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=sarkar
Conclude from the comments what you will.
According to TFA, even the guy's lawyer is asserting that the loss of tenure was an indirect consequence of the anonymous campaign:
Sarkar was a tenured researcher at Wayne State University.
He applied for, and initially received, an offer from University of Mississippi Medical Center. In order to take that job, he resigned his position at Wayne State.
Before his new job started, they revoked the offer. His lawyer says that the revocation was clearly a result of the anonymous campaign against him.
Wayne State allowed him to un-resign; but not to grant him tenure again.
My understanding is that actually being stripped of tenure is a much, much, bigger deal, one that would take some nice evidence of malpractice or some very, very, ugly togetherness issues with a substantial portion of the faculty and administration. In this case, he never actually lost tenure anywhere; but resigned it and then was unable to get it back when his other job fell through. Similar end result; but very different process.
I agree 500 papers over his career is indeed a lot. But remember that in some fields there's this general practice for the head of a research group having his name on every paper coming from his group (at least as a co-author) even if it's not written by himself or if the whole research has been carried out by his master's degree/PhD students. So actually, if you're the head of a large productive work group, it's possible to achieve such a publication rate doing "thorough, factual research".