Slashdot Mirror
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.
Even if some comments are clearly justified, from many comments one can discern a pattern of an active campaign against the other. For example, one commenter posts :
This brings the total number of paper with problems for Dr. Sarkar, at Wayne State Unversity, to what? 50, 60 papers commented on PubPeer??!!
Most of the image reviews have also been made by the same person, indicating an active campaign against the author.
As well as this may be justified, this is not the proper way to address critical review of already published papers. Assuming that the issues are that important (I can't judge as it is quite far from my field of expertise), letters should be sent to the editors highlighting the issues. Also, review or comment paper could be submitted to the journals.
With name like "Fazlul H. Sarkar" what else can you expect? He is just another Indian "specialist" (they are swarming all over IT like a maggots and now branching into science) whose only accomplishments are clever copy&paste from various sources until someone notices plagiarism. I guess next step for him is to play racism card.
Is losing a $350,000 job offer something you consider trivial? The scientist and his lawyer suspect foul play by anonymous person(s) who allegedly defamed him by posting ad hominem attacks in their pubpeer comments and then distributed those comment pages to both universities associated with him.
Any criticism of his work should be valid and fact based and that should be enforced by the site's moderators. Still, anonymity is important when criticizing someone and they should not use this as an excuse to force critics to reveal their identities.
Go look at the images. He's guilty of what the anon commenters accused him. It's obvious at its face without any further detective work needed. On top of that, look at the number of papers he's submitted over his career. He'd have had to been publishing at least one paper every month for 30 years! This guys a fraud and about to finish some in-depth research into the Streisand effect.
It is important to keep in mind that there is no factual proof that he lost his offer of employment at UoMMC or his tenure at Wayne due to the comments on PubPeer. Sarkar's lawyer claims that the retraction letter from UoMMC says this is why, but has declined to offer the letter as proof.
All that is factually known at this time is that the scientific integrity of Sarkar's articles have come under scrutiny, and that a potential job at UoMMC didn't pan out for him.
This part of the article caught my eye: "Roumel’s response is that his client has no responsibility to critics who refuse to put a name to their accusations. “I don’t think he has any obligation to provide the data [behind the papers called into question] to anyone other than a journal,” he says."
It is fundamentally wrong to fail to provide the data behind a published paper simply because the requester is anonymous or not a journal. The scientist involved has some questionable published figures and an explanation as to validity of the data would be useful to the scientist involved and to those who are questioning the figures. Far cheaper to put up the data and let the accusers hang themselves on the own stupidity or ignorance. On the other hand, if there is something less savory going on putting the data up would be a disaster and suing the accusers is an obvious strategy: accuse me of anything and I'll bury you in legal costs is a pretty steep penalty for questioning published data.
Unfortunately from my own experience with reproducing published work: the typical paper leaves a lot to be desired and sometimes, the published results cannot be reproduced using the methods and techniques described. This is sometimes due to fraud and most times due to incomplete experimental sections.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Walking in blind here, so help me out.
What's wrong with using the same data in in two different experiments? I mean, if you have an image of mars, and you want to analyze how much rust is in there and you also want to analyze how much the ice-cap changed.... why can't you use the same image? If you already have the data, why not use it again?
Did he work on two different experiments that were essentially the same thing? Like, he was double-dipping the grant pool for the same work?