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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.
Precisely, all the pro-censorship people think just like that. And I do have to admit that it does provide the advantage of expediency. So, waddya gonna do?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Um, I meant, think like him... I think...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A list of his articles on PubPeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=sarkar
Conclude from the comments what you will.
For a moment I thought it said PubBeer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Lawsuits are generally an unreliable alternative to income earned by full time employment. You can't sue "anonymous" any more than an organization should base a hiring decision on "anonymous" references or testimony.
Perhaps, the worst job market in decades is as much to blame as the candidate's desperation to come to terms with the hard reality: there are too many people available for hire, including and perhaps especially, those already employed and willing to jump ship, laterally. It seems "poaching" options are psychologically irresistible to committees who refer or decide hiring candidates that are a safe bet for a covered rear end.
There are two possibilities: He lost his tenure because there was an anonymous, incorrect peer review negative towards him. His work was actually good. In that case he should sue the university to make decisions based on anonymous, incorrect peer reviews.
Or he lost his tenure because there was an anonymous, but correct peer review negative towards him. His work wasn't up to scratch. In that case, his loss is deserved. If faults in his work were not detected in a normal review but only in further review by an anonymous person, these faults are still there and due to him. Suing would be like a criminal who got caught due to an anonymous tip suing the tipster.
I have a real problem with the concept of anonymous peer review without editorial oversight or not included in a due peer review process. That said, I do recognize the interest for post-publication peer review due to lacks in the commonly used review processes, although I do not believe this should be allowed to be done anonymously.
Anonymous review is usual in the peer-review processes of most journals, but these comments are in general non-public or at least reviewed by an editor before publication. Some reviewers choose to do their peer-review work without the cover of anonymity and I encourage this. If you have constructive criticism on the work of an other and can this criticism is well founded, you can very well do it openly.
I believe that the best why to process with peer-review is with a two steps process, where first the submitted paper is published in an open discussion paper. Comments from the official reviewers are public and any one can comment on the papers. Following the peer review process, the paper is published in the official paper which may be with or without open access (I prefer those with open access). Such a process encourages quality and brings the whole community in the peer-review process, but under the oversight of editors.
Something like PubPeer is extremely tricky. It's an open door to abuse and for commenter to wash their dirty linen in public. I don't know if such a platform is a good idea, especially with anonymity. I'd rather have a good review of the peer-review processes commonly used.
People should not be able to hide behind the mask of anonymity! If I correctly accuse someone of being a charlatan, I should be willing to have my mask removed so that the charlatan can attack me and/or my family. It is only right.
Besides, is it fair for someone to be able to snitch on another person, even if that other person is doing something wrong? I say NO!
A person should be able to commit crimes without fearing the possibility that some anonymous coward could expose them for being a criminal.
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.
So shouldn't these universities have figured out that there were anonymous person(s) involved defaming him by posting ad hominem attacks?
Tenure is competitive enough that simple accusations or slurs can be enough to sink a person. While it would be nice if solid research and objectivity were the only elements involved, there is a huge human factor which is distressingly easy to swing.
Probably not a university one would want to work at if they can't spot unsubstansiated comments. Or they were, or there could be many reasons, don't jump to conclusions.
If nothing else, in other countries the police would be handling this instead.
That if his accusers went to trial, they wouldn't be able to provide evidence that the researcher was a fraud. Presumably the researcher just wants the names so he can publicly harass them, and isn't willing to take this to trial because he knows that they are right.
I hope most of you learn the real lesson here: Don't attempt to expose people when you know they are publishing falsehoods. Niggas will bust a cap in yo ass if yo do. On an unrelated note, did you know that having a lot of melanin in your body allows you to fly like Superman?
$350k for a cancer researcher? Crap, that's far more than I'd expect. I actually RTFA thinking that I'd tell you off for making up a ridiculous number, but that is indeed what it says.
I shouldn't complain, better that it goes to someone doing something useful than yet another financial stooge, but it's still a big number.
It's possible that they were actually fooled(maybe somebody ancient enough to think that the internet has an editorial staff is still alive and has more seniority than god, maybe anonymous innuendo works even against people who think that they totally aren't fooled); but it's also possible that they weren't really interested:
It's not exactly news that, at least for jobs higher level than bagging groceries and not utterly standardized by some sort of hiring bureaucracy, a variety of somewhat intangible factors come into play. Good 'fit', how good the interviewers felt after talking with you, etc. If he rubbed somebody the wrong way; but but for one of those fuzzy reasons that either don't look good or probably aren't legal if written down, leaving some FUD on the table would be perfectly reasonable, if not entirely honest.
According to this he has put out a lot of papers.
Today, they revealed that the scientist involved is Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Sarkar, an author on more than 500 papers
He got his doctorate in 1978. That would be an average of less than 27 days between papers being published. One must admire someone who can do so much thorough, factual research in such a short time. An average of one paper a month is impressive.
Why is it a given that validity and factual basis should be enforced by the site's moderators?
Legally, Section 230 protections are largely in favor of the site and moderators. Not absolutely; but it takes some work to be liable for what a commenter said on your site. As a matter of practice, I'm certainly open to arguments in favor of the idea (and definitely open to the notion that a site wishing to be taken seriously might want to voluntarily practice good moderation); but it's hardly so self-evident that you can just toss it out without comment.
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.
Not being familiar with the subject, does his work hold up? If so any comments should be discarded, especially a place such as a university should be intellectually above paying attention to ad homien. If not then that's what you get for putting sub par or wrong things on line. It's just going to get ripped apart, especially on a site that invites it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
If he had a case, it would be against the people who retracted the job offer.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Tenure is competitive enough that simple accusations or slurs can be enough to sink a person. While it would be nice if solid research and objectivity were the only elements involved, there is a huge human factor which is distressingly easy to swing.
I thought tenure meant you had that job for life and you had to really fuck up to lose it? Almost as hard to get as to lose.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Geez, you could probably hire an assistant vollyball coach for that much money.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He's not losing a tenured job, nor failing to make tenure. He was offered a job that happened to include tenure, and then the offer was revoked.
The only relevance of tenure to this story is as part of the value of the job offer that was revoked.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Isn't science all about trolling other scientists, really?
Eh I guess you can sue anyone for anything in 'merica
And the great thing about suing someone in the US of A is that even if you lose, there is no penalty. The guy you sue is out a ton of legal bills and time defending himself, and if you lose, you can just walk away. That's why so many companies and individuals in the U.S. will just settle even if they know the person has a bogus suit.
Fuck all those silly European countries with their "loser pays the winner's legal bills" socialist shit! USA! USA! USA!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Sorry for the wall of text... summary and comments :P
From the Science article and PubPeer discussion on the topic, but not the comments on the papers by the aggrieved scientist (Dr Fazlul Sarkar), a broad summary would be that he was a tenured researcher at Wayne State University, who was offered a tenured position at University of Mississippi.
He resigned from Wayne State, then was informed by UoM that the offer was revoked. Dr Sarkur's lawyer comments that the retraction makes it "crystal clear" the retraction is because of the PubPeer comments on approximately 10% of Dr Sarkur's published and peer reviewed papers (more than 50 papers out of more than 500 he is listed as authoring), where the comments indicate that images used in specific papers look remarkably similar to images used in other papers relating to different experiments.
Wayne State agreed to take him back but did not offer him a tenured position. But how many other employees who resign and then say "I changed my mind, can I come back?" would be welcomed back?
Some of the negative comments on those papers then allegedly (I cannot comment directly as I have not read the comments, many of which have apparently been removed by PubPeer moderators) veered into insinuations of deliberate misconduct. Dr. Sarkur's lawyers are, of course, going to claim malice/intent in posts, and their removal is likely legal expedience, not an admission that the posts are inappropriate.
It seems to me that the logical approach would have been for Dr. Sarkur to engage in a process of defending his work against negative comments. Granted, that defense process may take some time - time that is better spend researching cancer cures, or figuring out how he will spend that huge salary he isn't going to get any more (trying not to laugh at this point...).
But according to his lawyer, "his client has no responsibility to critics who refuse to put a name to their accusations" - in other words, anonymous cowards will be ignored. I can sympathize with that approach, but at a time when scientific papers have taken a battering over experimental repeat-ability and interpretation of results, I would assume that anyone publishing a paper who is confident in their work would be willing to defend it, especially in an area with such life-changing possibilities as cancer research.
It is akin to a social media consultant smartening up their LinkedIn profile and then wondering why they do not get a job interview when their Facebook profile is a constant boast about their party lifestyle and their Twitter feed is a racist/homophobic diatribe.
As Dr. Sarkur has a Ph.D., I would assume that he is familiar with the process of authoring a paper or a thesis and then having to defend that work against examination, in a "viva voce" examination where multiple subject matter experts basically poke holes in the work and try to uncover any areas where the preparation and execution is sub-standard. It is just a shame that Dr. Sarkur feels that process need not apply now that he has his Ph.D.
Go look at the images. He's guilty of what the anon commenters accused him.
LOL, now you're getting sued, too.
Common misperception. Tenure simply means that your employment is no longer "at will" and to be fired requires going through an established process instead of just saying "you're fired and I don't need a reason!"
E pluribus unum
Go look at the images. He's guilty of what the anon commenters accused him.
LOL, now you're getting sued, too.
Sounds great. Given that I know his salary, my counter suit should be fairly lucrative if he can ever find employment again.
As the other reply pointed out, tenure is not quite that iron clad. However this issue is about getting tenure, a process that takes a decade or more where often at every step you are on a knife's edge of being let go. There is really no analogy in the business world, in non academic jobs you either advance or stay where you are, in academic ones things are barely tolerable where you are and there are enough people trying to get there that if you do not advance you leave the field. It is a surprisingly harsh system, much worse then what you see in corporate america.
I have always found the old 'those who can, do, those who can not, teach' rather ironic since for people who want to go into academia, private industry is where you go if you fail.
Yet if you zoom into that "dark rectangle" you see that it is not in fact a uniformly dark rectangle but has data in it. So what is the significance of that darker area, why would faking it be done and is it in fact an unreasonable set of data? Or is it enough to look at pictures of clouds and note that some look like lions, some like tigers, others bears and announce OH MY!
"Still, anonymity is important when criticizing someone" Maybe no.
Nah, this is a SLAPP lawsuit. You'll be forced to pay penalties and legal fees.
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Yes, the facts should be checked and once the truth is known, the proper action taken. This can range from full re-instatement of the job offer to confirmation of academic fraud. As it sits, it appears that someone who lost out on that $350,000 job decided to poison the waters, and it worked. Be a good idea to inspect those on that short list...
In other words, before tenure they are simply like everybody else in the real world. In industry (as opposed to academia), you are always on the knife's edge of being terminated. Some employers more so than others I'll grant, but I fail to see how it is any worse.
Mind you, I've played the academia game too. The pecking order in academia is more being at a very prestigious position or university as opposed to working at a state college/university and perhaps if you can't cut it you end up teaching at a community/junior college. Sometimes people don't want to play the game so they simply stick to that junior college where they can teach rather than fighting the publish or perish mentality.... or move onto even a high school where somebody with a PhD is treated with respect and not horrible pay (although perhaps less than a university although they will earn more than somebody with a BS). My 7th Grade English teacher had a PhD, and stuck around because he loved to teach kids in middle school even though he was offered a professorship elsewhere. He even published academic papers based on stuff he was doing in the classroom. There is nothing equivalent to that kind of system in private industry.
Actually it's amazingly possible, an embarassing number of times the biggest contribution a "lead investigater" makes is just signing his name on the paper. When you hire "Rock Stars", you have to expect prima donnas frequently burn thier bridges, they might be good at getting papers published and grants recieved, but that's only good if the minions keep working behind the scenes.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Not being familiar with the subject, does his work hold up?
I'm not an expert in the field but what I saw of the comments were very specific about reuse of figures and data without citation. They did not appear to be ad hominem at all but evidence based with image comparisons of figures from different papers. I expect that this is why he got into trouble - a relevant expert from the hiring university would be able to easily evaluate the merits of the comments.
Only if he's stupid enough to sue in one of the few states with decent SLAPP protections.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That makes sense... but with tenure can the reason for dismissal be as flimsy as "I saw some bad stuff about you on the Internet"?
"I don't like you anymore" and "I want to hire somebody else to do the job you have been doing, but who will accept less money for it" are reasons too.... but I don't think they are acceptable reasons to dismiss someone from a tenured position.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"He'd have had to been publishing at least one paper every month for 30 years!"
or, work on several papers with colleagues...you know, like what scientists do.
I looked at the images I could find nothing that indicated any fraud.
Anonymous speech doesn't protect you against slander or libel.
Sorry, but you can't go around making things up and lying and expect nothing to happen.
All I know about this is what I read in the articles. I am not accusing or defending anyone. I'm just pointing out that your comments, and many others, are about as valid as a testimony at the Salem witch trials.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Then how do we know he's an actual peer? This is an especially relevant question when it comes to certain scientific issues of an inflammatory politicized nature.
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.
I am reading through the comments related to his papers on pubpeer. I haven't found any personal attacks. May be there are some in the comments I have not read yet. However, what I find is a number of papers with blatantly manipulated images, use of the same image to represent different experiments in different papers and even a combination of the two. His defamation lawsuit has no legs and the university has every right to rescind its offer. In fact they would have been complicit if they did not do so. I predict that Dr. Sarkar's next discovery will be the Streisand effect.
If it's SLAPP then no.
There should be no penalties if you lose. That would have a horrible chilling effect. You should no, that loosing a suit you bring against someone doesn't mean you were wrong. It may just mean they had more expensive lawyers.
The actual amount of frivolous lawsuits brought in the country(USA) isn't nearly as many as you think it is. Exaggerating that number is a common political move done by corporations who want to prevent people from suing. Mostly insurance companies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Except that's not the issue.
The issue is, just the spike in comments, even with no evidence, cost him his tenure. Not actual scientific rebuttal.
This is equivalent to someone calling you work every hour until you boss gets fed up and lets you go.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Salaries in the academic world are crazy, and still getting worse - for example, rather than heralding how budget conscious the UC system is, paying chancellors "only" $319K, instead, they "fixed the problem" with a 20% across the board pay raise.
Just in time, I am sure, without making over $380K, I am sure all those administrators would just go work somewhere else and you wouldn't be able to find anyone qualified for such paltry salaries.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
According to a post in this thread, some negative comments were deleted by pubpeer mods. The image evidence does seem pretty damning, even to someone who knows nothing about cancer research.
I'm also not sure how research papers are actually authored, especially so many by one person. Couldn't it be someone else did the actual research, perhaps grad or PhD students and he just mentored them, gave them advice and edited a few things which gave him the right to put his name on the papers? In which case, I guess claiming credit for others' work bit him in the ass.
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?
"Is losing a $350,000 job offer something you consider trivial?"
Considering *I* have the intelligence and education to obtain another equally-paying job, yup, really fucking trivial. Especially if I can prove I wasn't munging the experimental reports and data.
Real scientists wouldn't care about a tenured position, because they could find one with equal pay rather easily. Real scientists would be welcomed just about anywhere as long as they were REPUTABLE.
The fact this guy got canned over a huge peer-review process which pointed out several unexpected things that should not have been is a giveaway and testament to the poor quality of the work from this scientist.
I want to know which reviewed papers brought this about. I'm genuinely curious to see if I spot the exact same thing every other peer-reviewer has seen.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
My experience is that most of the work is done by the first one or two authors under the direct supervision of the last author (there are exceptions when the lab is very big and the PI has delegated most of the supervision to postdocs or staff). Generally, the corresponding author on the paper bears much of the responsibility for the data being published under the assumption that he is supervising the research and is intimately involved in analyzing the results and writing the paper. Many journals now require a statement, which briefly outlines the authors contributions. Having said that it is not unheard of that a student or a postdoc will manipulate data and the PI in his willingness to prove a hypothesis will not be overly critical.
The deeper problem is that there is a huge pressure in the biomedical field to publish often. The PI will not be able to receive grants unless he/she has demonstrated a track record of productivity. If he/she doesn't get grant funding he/she will not be receiving full salary and will not get tenure. At the same time the competition for funding is furious. The percent of applications being funded by NIH are in the low teens and for some NIH institutes they are under 10%. So not only you have to publish, but you have to publish more and in better journals than 90% of the people in the field to be competitive. All this puts huge pressure on the PIs to publish. Few of them publish rubbish and some resort to fraud. Students and postdocs are under similar pressure to be "productive" not only from their PIs, but also because their future prospects depend on the research they publish.
The irony is that the current situation is to a large degree caused by the expansion of the NIH budget in the past. Public and private research institutions rushed to build lab space, recruit scientist and train students to take advantage of the NIH grants (this expansion still continues!). The incentive for the institutions is that they get 40% or more (up to 100%) on top of the grant award as an overhead. So a typical $250K per year grant from NIH will pay directly to the university at least $100K per year in overhead in addition to sponsoring the PI and staff salaries from the direct costs. The NIH budget, however, did not continue to grow rapidly after the initial jump during president Clinton's time in office and has actually shrunk in the past year. The result is that now you have a large number of scientist desperate for grant money and not enough grants to fund even a small fraction of them. The current incentives do not reward the quality of the research, but the speed by which it is done and its quantity. This is a very perverse situation. It also creates a negative feedback loop where the poor quality of the published data prevents people from defining valid hypotheses or identifying viable lines of research. As a result they waste time and are subject to even more pressure to publish junk.
So one has to ask: why isn't he suing the folks who revoked the offer, demanding to see their justification, or violation of contract, or some such?
Seems the website posting the comments, as well as the commenters themselves, should be irrelevant. If UMiss chose to revoke a valid offer, it ought to be up to them to show the comments prove fraud or incompetence.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
And in many of those silly European countries you can sue someone and prevail for making a factual statement. In the US, this commenter might have to spend money on his defense and win. In Europe, they could spend money and lose.
This guys a fraud and about to finish some in-depth research into the Streisand effect.
Repeatability is the hallmark of good science ....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Can we all work in your fantasy world? At least in the biomed fields, even 'reputable' scientists are having hard times getting grants and tenure. Not saying that this guy is reputable at all but it's a paramecium-eat-ameoba world out there.
'Nature red in tooth' and claw and all of that
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't suppose it's considered usual and customary to pay your own lawyer in the country you live in?
Now that would be different. Kinda like having a doctor's hand cut off if he didn't cure the patient.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Fuck all those silly European countries with their "loser pays the winner's legal bills" socialist shit! USA! USA! USA!
Interesting that you call a loser pays system socialist. As I recall, tort reform of the type you suggest was one of the points in the Contract with America put forward by the Republican party (led by Newt Gingrich) in the 1990s. Never heard Newt or his policies described as "socialist" before.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
And anyone that's making decisions about hiring and firing of staff at these levels should be as skilled as those they're hiring and firing. At this point HR is there to enforce on-the-books rules and to deal with the paperwork, but they're not taking overt action against an employee unless that employee has formal complaints that fall into the various types of practices that the organization has chosen to enforce against. Hiring and firing for academic publications and peer review is the purview of the board of the institution or of the college or of the department.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Was this a space-science researcher? If he's working on anything tangible that doesn't have an upper limit on the bandwidth of data collection like space-science does, then yes, I guess I would expect a researcher to do more than play mix-and-match with a large volume dataset to produce papers.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why? If the original data is sound enough for scientific analysis why recreate it? If the original data is truly sound, isn't there a great scope of things to go wrong by repeating the collection process?
The only reason I see not to re-use the data is if it is believed to not be sound, that the data is time dependent and no longer relevant, or that a modern method of data collection would yield more accurate results and would change the conclusion of the paper.
Except he can't defend himself against someone who can continue to make post whether or not they are accurate.
He could spend every day., all day trying to defend each time a comment is made. That would be pretty wasteful.
The person making the comment could actually go through normal peer review channels.
BTW AC comment aren't actually peer review.
Have you ever tried to defend yourself against one or more people making AC comments? It is not possible.
As I mentioned in the post, I have some sympathy for him regarding defending against the AC comments, but he does not appear to have made any attempt to defend the papers' data against any comments, AC or named. Making a cover-all defensive post to engage the named reviews and encourage the AC reviewers to post under their own names would, in my opinion, be a good middle ground between defending against all negative posts or defending against none.
It would also have given him some discussion points with the faculty recruitment people from UoM, which may or may not have helped. But the "I am going to ignore criticism, head in the sand, and then threaten to sue when that criticism causes or plays a part in me not getting a new job" approach is really not good for a researcher in the publish-or-perish world they live in.
"525 journals and 300+ abstracts"
Straight up serial publisher, is what it sounds like he is. Definite case of quantity over quality. Not surprised he got caught up.
Now go look at the product that was reviewed and cost the guy his job - http://rocalabs.com/
Seeing the word Nutraceutical is a dead-giveaway.
"Can we all work in your fantasy world?"
You guys can't even understand the mechanisms of photosynthesis enough to be able to bypass it entirely like I do in some plant species (and then get on the BBC for it.) You need a better understanding of science to get here. See you in 50 years.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.