The last resort of the scoundrel?

Retraction Watch has been subject to a legal attack, which has removed from public view all posts on the retractions of publications by Anil Potti. The legal move is surreal, since it is in essence a claim that the text of the posts is in breach of copyright… …of a web site that only existed after most of the posts appeared on Retraction Watch. Fans of Douglas Adams will remember this particular legal move well, an editor sending a copy of the Hitch Hikers Guide back in time to allow the originators of text plagiarised in the guide to be sued for break of copyright. This points to someone trying to remove the fact of these retractions from the visible public record. I certainly hope that Retraction Watch’s counter move succeeds.

There is a pattern here. Anil Potti found substantial fame and then was found guilty of misconduct, papers have been retracted and Duke paid back grant funds (brief synopsis here). The only outcome should have been institutions (from journals to Universities) upping their game in terms of the rigour with which they assess the quality of research, rather than relying on reputation and impact factor of publications (reading the paper never did any harm…). Now, we have an attempt to use the law to censor what is entirely appropriate scientific debate: once published there is nothing confidential about the results in a paper. This is reminiscent with the means used to close down Science Fraud.
It doesn’t look good for science. Peer review can limp, because some reviewers cannot be bothered to actually read papers or grants (and in the latter case, read some of the cited literature they may be unfamiliar with). Editors at times just shrug their shoulders at notifications of plagiarism, including self-plagiarism and requesting data from authors is documented to often lead to nothing. This is at odds with what science claims to be and with institutional policies, whether it is the editorial guidelines of journals (the stipulation that data should be new and once published, shared, is common to all journals) and the rules on plagiarism and collusion. I recently highlighted the rules in force at MIT. For my Francophone audience, here is an excellent set of rules in French, from EPFL, which are a great model for any institution needing to overhaul their own rules.
So the dichotomy between how science actually operates and how it claims to operate remains. On the bright side, I do receive e-mails from righteously angry colleagues, so there is clearly a mass of people who would much prefer science to follow its own guidelines, rather than flouting them. The challenge then is not that we need new rules, but rather that individuals and institutions need to enforce the existing rules.