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Anonymous Peer-review Comments May Spark Legal Battle

Posted by Soulskill on from the jig-is-up dept.

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.

19 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. His articles on PubPeer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A list of his articles on PubPeer:

    https://pubpeer.com/search?q=sarkar

    Conclude from the comments what you will.

    1. Re:His articles on PubPeer by geogob · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Why did he lose tenure? by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why did he lose tenure? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Why did he lose tenure? by PvtVoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      There's a third, more mundane possibility: he lost his tenure because he quit. When he lost his new job offer, he went back to Wayne State asking for his old job back, and they said no. The devil is in the details here. If he had a written employment and tenure agreement with Mississippi all signed and finalized, he would have a damn good case against Mississippi. TFA is not clear on this point, but I would hazard a guess that he got an informal notice that Mississippi intended to hire him, quit at Wayne State before the offer was official, and then Miss yanked the offer before they were legally committed. This kind of shit happens all the time. So sorry.

      Moral: never, ever, quit your current job until the ink is dry on the legal papers for your new one.

    3. Re:Why did he lose tenure? by Notabadguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Why did he lose tenure? by Casualposter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
  3. Anonymous public peer review by geogob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Anonymous public peer review by geogob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sorry, but I won't hesitate to openly criticize a bigwig if I believe I have the basis to do so. I won't sell my integrity for a tenured position. But I will not do it on A platform like PubPeer.

      Not sure if to "wash dirty linen" exactly convey what I meant, but regardless I did not suggest this was the case or that is done. I said it is an open door to such action. As I am not a user of the PubPeer platform, I cannot judge if comments meant to attack the reputation of an other due to private disputes commonly occur. Furthermore, such attacks with other motive as pure improvement of scientific publication quality are difficult to spot, because this is what anonymous commenting enables to do.

      Tenure track are extremely competitive, especially in fields like biomedical research. Knowing the human nature and with some of the dirty stuff I saw in my career, I can't imaging nobody would abuse this system to wrongfully block someone's progress at some point.

  4. Re:Know who to sue by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  5. Re:Incompetence by jythie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Know who to sue by stealth_finger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Eh I guess you can sue anyone for anything in 'merica

    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
  7. Re:Know who to sue by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Eh I guess you can sue anyone for anything in 'merica

    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.

  8. Re:Timing by pjt33 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    His role on most of the papers was probably just to write the grant request.

  9. Re:Know who to sue by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Geez, you could probably hire an assistant vollyball coach for that much money.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  10. Re:Know who to sue by NotDrWho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:Incompetence by jythie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  12. Not ad hominem by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Know who to sue by HeckRuler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?