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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.