What this site used to be…
From July to December of 2012, this site was run as a blog, to report on numerous instances of apparent data irregularities in the life sciences literature. The site was run under the pseudonyms “Fraudster” and “Frances deTriusce” (the latter an anagram of science fraudster). The anonymous email account scifraudster@gmail.com was used for readers to send in suspected examples.
When the shit hit the fan…
In January 2013, someone saw fit to reveal my identity as the blogger – I’m Paul Brookes, a scientist at the University of Rochester in Upstate NY. This same person invited over 100 scientists whose work had been reported here, to initiate legal action against me for defamation. To date (spring 2014), 6 such individuals have officially threatened to do so. This required me to shut down the site, hire a lawyer to defend against these claims, and try to stabilize my relationship with the institution that has graciously allowed me to remain employed. You can read all about the aftermath here.
The outcome…
During its existence, the site reported on some 274 papers. To date (spring 2014) there have been 47 corrections and 16 retractions, with more coming in every week. As a, I was recently able to published a study investigating the effect of such internet discussion of problematic papers on the eventual action taken by journals and other insitutions. The paper is in PeerJ, and the essential result is that “going public” increases the likelihood of action by 7-fold, compared to just keeping things under wraps.
Legacy materials, alternative sites, what next…
Much of the material published on this site is still out there in cyberspace for those willing to look (although for legal reasons I can’t link to any of it). In addition if anyone has a specific request for information from these pages, please email me and I’ll try to share privately. In the year or so since this site was shuttered, there have been a number of new sites and initiatives aimed at “post-publication peer review”. The most prominent are PubPeer and NCBI’s PubMed Commons. Some of the material from this site is gradually finding its way back into the public realm via these avenues, as well as in comments threads at retraction watch, and on my own lab’ website and on Twitter.
In addition I’m continuing to fight ongoing battles with journal editors regarding certain cases, as well as reporting new instances to the US Office of Research Integrity, filing complaints with the Committee On Publication Ethics, and of course badgering journal editors and institutional Research Integrity Officers just to pay attention. Furthermore, I’m involved with a number of other projects in this area, working with others to use the data I’ve obtained over the past 3 years to help develop new tools and to simply help understand “the nature of the beast” (and believe me, it’s a beast!) There’s a lot of noise right now in the post-pub peer review field, and it’s going to be interesting to see the academic publications system evolve in the coming years. I’d like to think this site played a (very) small part in advancing the debate in this area. For the time being, I plan on keeping the domain and site registered (mostly for the purpose of preventing cyber-squatting or someone who’s annoyed with me using it for astro-turfing and negative SEO), but I won’t be updating here very often or responding to the site’s email address.