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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.

11 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. 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.

  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: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.

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  6. 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.

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

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

  8. 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