血笔战洋奴鬼子:《撤稿观察》本质也是一个行为不轨的家伙，双重标准对待科研出版涉及"中外"的不轨行为
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前几天笔者发表了《知识分子》是守科学诚信还是做洋科走狗"霸道", 抨击中国学者"剽窃"？请看事实如何说话?通过摆事实来讲道理，揭露一些所谓的“中国顶级知识分子”或许就是一些“高级洋科走狗”。
这些《知识分子》跟着《撤稿观察》说发表在Scientific Reports的来自中国哈尔滨工业大学（Harbin Institute of Technology）深圳研究院Bin Liu等的一篇研究论文被美国约翰·霍普金斯大学的生物学家Michael Beer指责为“剽窃”。
但笔者了解情况后发现，Bin Liu等人的这篇论文不仅明确引用了Beer等人的论文，而且在被指责为“剽窃”的情况下，还能非常大度地公开向Beer道歉并作了长达近两页的更正 。
笔者认为，事情到了那个地步，该收场的就应该收场。
为此，笔者在《撤稿观察》的Scientific Reports 组成高级委员会再度审查此案 一文下发表了如下评论：
Retraction Watch
Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process
Journal to assemble “senior editorial committee” to review paper that led to board resignations
with 16 comments
The 2016 paper in question has been accused of plagiarism by a researcher at Johns Hopkins, Michael Beer . Following the initial allegation, the journal decided to correct, not retract, the paper. After we covered the story , nearly two dozen Hopkins researchers threatened to resign if the journal didn’t retract the paper . This week, the journal reaffirmed its initial decision, and the resignations are pouring in .
Yesterday, Suzanne Farley, Executive Editor of Scientific Reports, a Nature Publishing Group journal, sent us a statement:
Concerns about any paper we publish are of paramount importance to us. We will be assembling a senior editorial committee to undertake a further assessment of this case and will also be seeking additional independent advice from external ethics experts. Whilst these considerations take place, we will be adding an Editorial Note to the paper, which states:
Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that this paper is subject to criticisms related to misrepresentation of the original contribution reported and of previous work. We are consulting with ethics experts and readers will be updated once this consultation is complete.
Beer has alleged that the 2016 paper, an application of an algorithm designed to better identify regulatory sequences in DNA, simply reworded his paper and used some of his equations, while making claims to novelty. Beer asked that the paper be retracted; the author of the paper has denied plagiarizing Beer’s work. The correction , issued at the end of 2016, explicitly credited Beer’s previous paper on the topic.
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Written by Alison McCook
November 10th, 2017 at 8:00 am
Posted in nature publishing group ,plagiarism ,scientific reports
« Newly released AI software writes papers for you — what could go wrong?
A journal retracted a paper when authors couldn’t pay. Then it retracted the retraction. »
Comments
rfg November 10, 2017 at 1:13 pm
A positive step in the right direction.
NPG should decide that corrections are to be reserved for correcting honest errors by the authors or production team, not for covering up ethical breaches by the authors.
Applying this simple formula throughout the publishing industry would be the right thing to do and go a long way towards restoring faith in the scientific literature.
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Akhlesh November 10, 2017 at 5:58 pm
From instructions in 2013 to a reviewer from the editorial board of Scientific Reports: “To be considered for publication in Scientific Reports, a paper should be technically sound. Technical soundness refers to both methods and analysis, i.e. the methods must be appropriate and properly conducted, and the conclusions drawn must be fully supported by the data. Referees are asked not to make a judgement on the paper’s importance – we ask the scientific community to make this judgement themselves post-publication.
“Scientific Reports, unlike other journals published by Nature Publishing Group, does not, therefore, require an advance within a given field, and there is no requirement for novelty or broad interest.”
So, there is no requirement for novelty!
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ICC November 11, 2017 at 2:52 pm
More bureaucratic maneuvering to save face and stall the process.
The situation is quite clear: an editor at Sci. Rep. can pay a fee and publish other’s work under his name. Pay-to-play. The community will not stand for it.
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Tekija November 12, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Akhlesh
“Scientific Reports, unlike other journals published by Nature Publishing Group, does not, therefore, require an advance within a given field, and there is no requirement for novelty or broad interest.”
So, there is no requirement for novelty!
Everything worked better when each journal had to pay for its activity with prescription income. They had to publish what is novel and, ideally, of broad interest. The call for open access opened a scientific Pandora’s box that seeded among other things megajournals that with increasing speed collude the literature with papers that eventually will mostly lack in novelty or broad interest just to get easy money. This year, Sci Rep already have published 22,557 papers….
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Akhlesh November 12, 2017 at 2:03 pm
Tekija: “Everything worked better when each journal had to pay for its activity with prescription income. They had to publish what is novel and, ideally, of broad interest. The call for open access opened a scientific Pandora’s box that seeded among other things megajournals that with increasing speed collude the literature with papers that eventually will mostly lack in novelty or broad interest just to get easy money. This year, Sci Rep already have published 22,557 papers….”
1. Perhaps, Scientific Reports will have to refund, either completely or partially, the APC in case of a retraction. Hence, corrections will be preferable to retractions.
2. I generally avoid citing articles from both Scientific Reports and PLOS One.
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Kai Henningsen November 13, 2017 at 2:43 am
Akhlesh
Well, I disagree. If a journal doesn’t instruct its reviewers to assess novelty, I will avoid citing papers from that journal, in order that credit not be given to the wrong person(s). There are exceptions, when I know the authors.
And attitudes like this are why there are so few replications and negative results published.
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Shi Liu November 14, 2017 at 11:29 am
I have read the related news and even the two papers in dispute. I think a charge of “plagiarism”, intentional steeling credit from a previous work, is an over-blow because the previous work was not only referenced (ref. 33) but also cited multiple times in the paper accused with “plagiarism”. Thus, Scientific Reports has made a correct decision to allow the publication of a Correction which not only offered apology for any ambiguous presentations but also praised the previous work even with a reference in the abstract. On the other hand, retracting a paper with solid research advancements will not serve any benefit to science but may promote more disturbances in scientific communities.
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o
Vladimir Svetlov November 14, 2017 at 12:53 pm
One doesn’t “praise” other people’s work with references, it’s call acknowledgement and it’s not negotiable. What you seem to be referring to already corrected paper, not the original that fully earned the charge of plagiarism. SR Managing Editor admitted the fact of plagiarism, but argued whether or not the degree of plagiarism warranted a retraction. This Editor seems to be operating under an erroneous impression that there are degrees of plagiarism, just like there are fractional cases of pregnancy. With majority of the equations lifted from already published work, the article in SR is massively derivative, lacking any originality, and fairly illiterate. The only contributions it makes are to the authors’ CVs and SR’s bottom line.
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Miguel Roig November 15, 2017 at 8:08 am
Vladimir, I respectfully disagree with your position regarding ‘degrees of plagiarism’. There are, in fact, different types of plagiarism and varied degrees of seriousness of these types of malpractices. Surely, you will agree that plagiarizing one full sentence is not as serious as plagiarizing several paragraphs, or that merely plagiarizing snippets of text from different sources is not as serious as passing as one’s own someone else’s ideas. I tend to agree that in this case the original paper should have been retracted rather than corrected, but I strongly believe that each case should be decided based on its own (de)merits and not on some blanket rule.
笔者的评论是：
I have read the related news and even the two papers in dispute. I think a charge of "plagiarism”, intentional steeling credit from a previous work, is an over-blow because the previous work was not only referenced (ref. 33) but also cited multiple times in the paper accused with "plagiarism”. Thus, Scientific Reports has made a correct decision to allow the publication of a Correction which not only offered apology for any ambiguous presentations but also praised the previous work even with a reference in the abstract. On the other hand, retracting a paper with solid research advancements will not serve any benefit to science but may promote more disturbances in scientific communities.
我阅读了相关的新闻甚至于两篇有争议的论文。我认为“剽窃”（有意从前人工作偷取名利）的指控是有些过头，因为在这篇被指为“剽窃”的论文里以前的工作不仅被引用（参考文献33）而且还在文中多处提及。因此，《科学报告》作出的发表一个更正的决定是正确的。这个更正不仅对模糊的表述表示了道歉，还对前人的工作通过在摘要中引用而表示了赞扬。反之，将一个有坚实研究进展的论文撤稿不仅对科学无益处还会在科学社会引发不安。
笔者评论发表后，先后有三个跟随评论被《撤稿观察》登出：
其中，Michael Beer对我的评论的评论还点了我的名。
本着“礼尚往来”的中国优良传统，笔者给Michael Beer进行了如下回复：
Response:
Dear Dr. Beer, I did notice the two different terms: “gkm-SVM” and “SVM-GKM” appeared in yours and Liu’s paper, respectively. I also saw some slight differences in the formulations for the equations as you characterized with changed variables. I am not sure if these slight changes in variables would make some difference in calculations and thus be considered as something “new” and required written out again in the Materials and Methods section. Any way I understood your emotion when you perceived these as an intentional plagiarism. As an editor of Scientific Ethics, I have seen many more much severe cases of truly intentional plagiarism than this one. Many of them involved robbing all credits from me by totally ignoring my published pioneering discoveries. For example, you can check on many so-called “novel” discoveries on bacterial aging or cell aging in high impact factor journals and to see if any of these high-profile papers have ever cited my original publications such as “Tracking bacterial growth in liquid media and a new bacterial life model” (Science in China Series C: Life Sciences December 1999, Volume 42, Issue 6 , pp 644–654; https://link.springer. com/article/10.1007/BF02881583 ) and “Method and apparatus for producing age-synchronized cells ” (Patent US 6767734 B2: http://www.google.ch /patents/US6767734 ). At a minimum Liu et al.’s paper cited your work in the original version and offered an apology in an extensive Corrigendum. Thus, if I were you, I would stop at this point and do not demand a retraction of this paper. I think that, even the application of your original predictor gkm-SVM or its modified form SVM-GKM lacked a novelty as you would expect, the success of this application in a situation (recombination spot identification) different than yours (regulatory sequence prediction) would still considered as valuable scientific information which should be preserved in scientific literature.
这个回复是“成功”地贴上去了：
Shi Liu November 16, 2017 at 3:21 pm
Dear Dr. Beer, I did notice the two different terms: “gkm-SVM” and “SVM-GKM” appeared in yours and Liu’s paper, respectively. I also saw some slight differences in the formulations for the equations as you characterized with changed variables. I am not sure if these slight changes in variables would make some difference in calculations and thus be considered as something “new” and required written out again in the Materials and Methods section. Any way I understood your emotion when you perceived these as an intentional plagiarism. As an editor of Scientific Ethics, I have seen many more much severe cases of truly intentional plagiarism than this one. Many of them involved robbing all credits from me by totally ignoring my published pioneering discoveries. For example, you can check on many so-called “novel” discoveries on bacterial aging or cell aging in high impact factor journals and to see if any of these high-profile papers have ever cited my original publications such as “Tracking bacterial growth in liquid media and a new bacterial life model” (Science in China Series C: Life Sciences December 1999, Volume 42, Issue 6, pp 644–654; https://link.springer.com /article/10.1007/BF02881583 ) and “Method and apparatus for producing age-synchronized cells ” (Patent US 6767734 B2: http://www.google.ch /patents/US6767734 ). At a minimum Liu et al.’s paper cited your work in the original version and offered an apology in an extensive Corrigendum. Thus, if I were you, I would stop at this point and do not demand a retraction of this paper. I think that, even the application of your original predictor gkm-SVM or its modified form SVM-GKM lacked a novelty as you would expect, the success of this application in a situation (recombination spot identification) different than yours (regulatory sequence prediction) would still considered as valuable scientific information which should be preserved in scientific literature.
Comment awaiting moderation.
但是，等了两天还不见它被登出来。
于是，笔者给《撤稿观察》主编发去如下电子信询问。
《撤稿观察》主编发来如下答复：
对此，笔者当即回复：
Hi Ivan
I am surprised to see that you gave the same response to me as you did before.
However , it is not easy to substantiate my allegations if you have a determination to do that.
What I can tell now is that you and your Retraction Watch have obviously took a double standard towards exposing misconduct in scientific research. This is not good at all for science.
I wish you would change this malpractice or Retraction Watch will suffer great damage.
Sincerely,
Shi V. Liu
由于是在手机上匆忙回复，发现竟“词不达意”地犯了一个“严重的”错误。于是，又给《撤稿观察》主编发去如下说明：
Hi Ivan
I made a typo in my last response by saying that "However , it is not easy to substantiate my allegations if you have a determination to do that."
What I wanted to say is: However , it is VERY easy to substantiate my allegations if you have a determination to do that.
I wish that Retraction Watch will spend some time to investigate my "allegations" made before many times and then to see if they are truly "unsubstantiated".
Best,
Shi Liu
看到这里，大家应当心里有些底了吧！
原来，这个“一本正经”地揭露科研出版中的不轨行为的《撤稿观察》，其实本身就是一个行为不轨的家伙。
而其对一些华科的不遗余地的“追杀”和对许多洋科的死心塌地的“保护”，则是当今世界国际高端学腐盛行的一个不可忽视的原因。
对此，作为《蝌蚪士》的主编，笔者将率同仁与海外学霸、大陆洋奴血战到底、争取为世界创造一个科学研究的美好新时代！ 为此，预告《Critical Science》即将创刊，为中华儿女学术抗战与科学辩论的平台。