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posted by n1 on Monday October 27 2014, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the freedom-to-be-publicly-defamed dept.

Over at Science is a story on the attempts of Wayne State University cancer researcher Falzul Sarkar to sue PubPeer commenters for defamation.

Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, had threatened legal action after the University of Mississippi rescinded its offer of a tenured, $350,000-per-year position. Sarkar, who remains employed at Wayne state, claimed that anonymous comments suggesting misconduct in his research caused the university to revoke its offer.

Although Sarkar is not suing PubPeer itself he is attempting to force the site to hand over identifying information on the anonymous commenters. From an article in Retraction Watch.

Sarkar’s attorney acknowledges that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects PubPeer itself from a suit. He will try, however, to convince a court that PubPeer has an obligation to turn over commenters’ identifying information. The argument here is that the site allowed comments that violated its own policy, and that some of the comments referred to a complaint filed with Wayne State that should have been kept confidential.

There are more details in an article over at Retraction Watch which also has an earlier background article.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @11:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @11:29PM (#110693)

    so when you post as an anonymous coward you are not an anonymous coward.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday October 27 2014, @11:31PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 27 2014, @11:31PM (#110695) Journal
    From the Retraction Watch article:

    Then, however, things, well, went south:

    [I]n a letter dated June 19, 2014 – just eleven days before Dr. Sarkar was to begin his active employment – Dr. [Larry Walker, the Director of the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi Cancer Institute] rescinded that employment, as additionally confirmed by the Chancellor Jones on June 27, in effect terminating Dr. Sarkar before he’d even begun. Dr. Walker’s June 19, 2014 letter cited PubPeer as the reason, stating in relevant part that he had “received a series of emails forwarded anonymously from (sic?)PubPeer.com, containing several posts regarding papers from your lab. These were also sent at about the same time to Dr. Kounosuke Watabe, Associate Director of Basic Sciences for the Cancer Institute at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I learned yesterday that several were sent on the weekend of 14 June to Dr. David Pasco, Assistant Director of the National Center for Natural Products Research.”

    Walker wrote:

    At this point, we cannot go forward with an employment relationship with you and your group. With these allegations lodged in a public space and presented directly to colleagues here (I am not sure of the scope of the anonymous distribution), to move forward would jeopardize our research enterprise and my own credibility.

    Even if Doctor Sakar is guilty of some sort of mischief, that is a very slim pretext on which to reverse a hiring decision. Anonymous people said bad things about you to the right people, therefore we can't hire you.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:03AM (#110700)

      Anonymous people said bad things about you to the right people, therefore we can't hire you.

      Well, it seems like more than that if you poke around on PubPeer. It looks like he was accused of manufacturing images for some papers out of images from other papers on different research he did, and the posters included side-by-side comparisons. The posters being anonymous really doesn't matter when they are posting evidence. Of course, we don't know exactly what Dr. Walker looked at, and I don't know anything about this field of research to judge how damning these are, but:
      example 1 [pubpeer.com]
      example 2 [pubpeer.com]

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:01AM

        by frojack (1554) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:01AM (#110709) Journal

        Well, it seems like more than that if you poke around on PubPeer. It looks like he was accused of manufacturing images for some papers out of images from other papers on different research he did, and the posters included side-by-side comparisons. The posters being anonymous really doesn't matter when they are posting evidence. Of course, we don't know exactly what Dr. Walker looked at, and I don't know anything about this field of research to judge how damning these are.

        Modded you interesting even though I don't think using the same photograph is all that damaging, especially since the papers were pretty much back to back time-wise. As long a the photos and the work were his own, I don't see any problem with using the same photo for two different papers.

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        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by RobotMonster on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:52AM

          by RobotMonster (130) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:52AM (#110722) Journal

          If you look at the first side-by-side, the problem isn't that they're the "same" -- it's that portions of the second image were fabricated by flipping portions of the first image -- i.e. the "data" being presented in the second figure was fabricated.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by Joe on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:52AM

          by Joe (2583) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:52AM (#110723)

          The same image with different labels or modifying (flipping and altering the size) an existing result to fabricate some new result is where it becomes a problem. Some of the alleged copying/modifying seems to be for experimental controls that may be somewhat acceptable if the experiments were done in parallel, but others (if falsified) would be clear misconduct. The conclusions of the research may still be well supported, but any misrepresentation of any of the data will call everything into question.

          There are 10-15 total contributing authors when you combine the two papers and 4 that are on both. Sarkar may not be directly responsible even if the images were faked.
          - Joe

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Tuesday October 28 2014, @03:12AM

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 28 2014, @03:12AM (#110739)

          I was thinking the same thing until i saw the black with green dots. Photoshopped that one pretty good. It looks like a combination of several other cancer cell cultures. I can't think of any valid reason to photoshop part of a control group picture into one that was treated with something. http://imgur.com/poxpa7b [imgur.com]

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          • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:41AM

            by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:41AM (#110789) Homepage

            There may not have been any actual manipulation of the image - at least as far as copying/pasting/cloning goes. They seem to just be two different crops/rotations of the same source image - not that that isn't suspicious, but it does make human error slightly more plausible (it's not clear whether the problem is that the same image appears in different papers, or appears twice in the same paper)

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            • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 28 2014, @06:54PM

              by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 28 2014, @06:54PM (#110942)

              Very true, it could be an unaltered picture other than a rotation and different crop. However the same picture could never appear in both a control group and non-control group. Something is going on there.

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      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:14PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @12:14PM (#110823)

        It's really not uncommon for blots like those to look extremely similar. To see similar shaped bands, particularly for the same target on multiple gels is not particularly surprising. To see similar intensity bands, if they're using an electronic imaging system with automatic gain control, is not particularly shocking. Especially for a 'housekeeping' target like b-actin. There's nothing wrong with flipping or rotating images; most of the time it's acceptable to apply uniform filters to images (often done to increase contrast), but it is not ok to apply regional filters (eg, to darken one band and lighten another). Visually similar bands from different gels should still have different pixel values. All of these images should be archived in a lossless format, and pixel-wise comparison should quickly reveal whether they're the same or not.

        It's not appropriate to combine bands from multiple gels without making clear they're from separate gels. The only image that raises my personal suspicion is Mol Cancer Ther 2006 Fig 1D Notch-1, because adjacent bands slant in opposite directions. Because gels are run as a big slab, a given target should migrate as a continuous front across adjacent lanes, and these look like they somehow manage to zig-zag. Mix-and-matching the "representative" bands from different gels is misleading.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:07AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @05:07AM (#110761) Journal

    Seems like this is the new sub-prime mortage area! Not to mention these "for profit" "CancerCenters" that will give you the diagnosis you want, if you have any liquid assets left. In Hawaii, the corruption was such a big deal that the Chancellor tried to have the Director of the Cancer Center fired for incompetence, and the President of the University system fired the Chancellor instead. Now they say, Aloha, but you do not F**k with Michele Carbone! And of course, the candidate for Governor in Texas has similar issues.