Webinar presentation at RWTH Aachen Promotionscafe, 26.11.2020

1. leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid
www.ForBetterScience.com
Leonid Schneider, PhD
Independent science journalist
Scientific Publishing is
Hacked

2. Outline
 The danger and origins of science fraud
 Broken system
 Chinese paper mills
 Open Access
 Predatory Publishing
 Predatory Conferences
 Plan S
 Preprints
 Blowing the Whistle
 Bonus: COVID-19 bunk

3. Is bad science
individual or systemic failure?
Hint: it’s both!

4. Why do scientists manipulate data?
 To prove a pre-conceived
theory against lack of
experimental evidence
 To scoop a competitor lab on
an unpublished discovery
they made
 When caught: careless
visionary genius, someone
else did it, findings still
reproducible, conclusions
always unaffected

5. Junior scientists are often pressured or bullied by their advisors:
- If you can deliver this result, you will publish a nice paper
and have a job
- If you don’t deliver this result, you will not publish any
paper and have no job (or get deported!)
Dangerous confirmation bias:
- repeating experiment to be sure of its result’s reproducibility
is not the same as
- repeating it until the result finally fits the “expected” one
How it starts

6. Scientists occasionally help data to fit their
theoretical model for a publication
 Selective data acquisition, omission of critical
controls (very common)
 “Adjustments” or manipulation of data
(more widespread than you think!)
 Data falsification / fraud
(rare, often by „recycling“ old data)

7. Unnatural selection for research misconduct
 Scientists waste time, money and their careers trying to reproduce bad science
others made at little cost.
 Highly competitive environment polluted by bad science undermines
productivity, motivation and work moral: people leave or cheat
 Bully PIs demanding results foster research misconduct in their labs
 Dishonest mentors procreate by appointing dishonest mentees into faculty jobs

8. Risk vs gain
 Manipulating data or working “sloppily” is a risk
 Benefits are huge: science rarely sanctions misconduct
 Risk to your career diminishes with your status increase:
 Junior researchers get sacked while professors get reprimanded
 Senior researchers enjoy supportive and forgiving peer
networks
 Avoid getting caught until tenure!
 Blame student/postdoc/technician/third party

9. What happens if a published paper is found to
contain manipulated data?
1. Correction (rare)
2. Retraction (even rarer)
3. Nothing* (most common)
*unless it enters public debate

10. Every paper on its own merit
• Academia loves to give second chances to fraudsters. It shows tolerance and openness.
But not to whistleblowers who report fraud.
• Same with journals: a convicted fraudster is rarely blacklisted. Trust is restored if no
visible data manipulation is detected.

11. Chinese success story
 China took over in scientic research output
 Much of this research is unreliable or outright fraudulent*
 A lot is fabricated outright by third-party contractors: papermills
* This is what happens
when state imposes goals
and direction of research

12. Paper mills
 Work by „Smut Clyde“, „Tiger BB8“, Elisabeth Bik et al exposed
several Chinese paper mills
 Utterly fake published in peer-reviewed journals by Elsevier,
Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Springer Nature…
 Some made utterly out of thin air for
hospital doctors without a lab, because
promotion requires publications
 Some custom-made for university professors
with labs and grad students and
governmental research grants
 We only know of China, but what about
India, Iran, The West??

13. Maths Paper mills
 You think it‘s just
biomedicine?
 Smut Clyde exposed a
mathematics papermill!
 Featuring non-existent
coauthors with
European-sounding
names and made-up
mathematical formulas
 All passed “peer review”
at Springer Nature!

14. What’s the point of science?
• Is a paper validated by some peer reviewers, so others don’t have
to read it after it’s published?
• Are we writing papers for peer reviewers only then? What kind of
science is this?
@schneiderleonid

15. Open Access to save the day?
• Open Access (OA) movement was born with widespread
Internet, in 1990ies
• Idea was to reduce publishing costs and make papers accessible
to everyone. Scientific publishing was to become fair and honest.
• All science’s problems were thought to root in inaccessibility due
to subscription paywall
• In a way, OA is like communism
ideology: it makes wrong
assumptions about economy and
human nature

16. The low-cost fallacy
• OA advocates still assume publishing costs nothing, especially in
times of internet
• Their theory is: because all my own papers are good, so are all
other papers
• Reality: many manuscript submissions are plagiarized, self-
plagiarized, salami-sliced, scientifically abysmal, or fraudulent
• Quality control and copy editing
costs money, it’s a full-time job
• Peer reviewer are indeed unpaid,
but even academic editors expect a
honorarium

17. Predatory publishing
• OA is product of internet, and so is predatory publishing
• OA journals need to finance themselves in absence of
subscriptions. They charge authors instead of readers
• Supply side: without external funding, OA journals cannot
afford to be selective
• Demand side: Scientists want journals which accept their
papers fast, without hassle
• Predatory and vanity publishers arrive, not
just in OA, also in subscription bundles!

18. Predatory conferences
 A gigantic industry exists to provide fake scientific conferences in
hotel meeting rooms and a fake conference proceedings paper
 Scientists who go there KNOW it’s a scam: you pay for your
invitation as speaker
 But they get a free vacation paid
by research money, a
publication in a predatory
journal, an invited conference
talk for CV, and sometimes a
fake award or a medal
 Biggest providers are: OMICS,
BitCongress, WASET, WSEAS etc

19. IAAM of Ashutosh Tiwari
 Ashutosh Tiwari used to be “docent” at Linköping University in
Sweden
 Together with his patron Professor Tony Turner, Tiwari built a
scamference empire: International Association of Advanced
Materials (IAAM), with an attached predatory publisher VBRI Press
 Following my reporting, Tiwari and Turner were found guilty of
research misconduct, shown the door

20. IAAM of Ashutosh Tiwari
 But Tiwari’s IAAM scam
continues, his fake awards
are still craved
 Leopoldina member and KIT
professor Herbert Gleiter
went to IAAM scamference
on a ferry ship in Southeast
Asia despite being warned.
Leopoldina celebrated in a
press release (later removed)
 Did you receive an IAAM
invitation also?

21. Bremen Rector even
 Bernd Scholz-Reiter, rector of University of Bremen and
logistics professor, published many papers in predatory
journals by WSEAS, WASET etc
 These were “conference proceedings”, meaning Bremen
researchers went on gratis holidays in the Mediterranean
to get “talks” and papers in predatory journals
 Scholz-Reiter has been publishing same
papers several times (self-plagiarism) and
submitted duplicates to DFG and in his
rector job application
 When caught, Scholz-Reiter said he wanted
to support Open Access

22. OA as mega-business
• Commercial publishers control the market
• They even create their own fake OA competition
• Non-profit community OA journals struggle to survive

23. Road to hell is paved with good intentions!
• same commercial publishers dominate
• same intransparent peer review
• Same obsession with metrics and brands
• Its costs to publish in OA, many scientists can’t afford it
• costs rise and rise, and it still costs to read
• Predatory behaviour both in OA and subscriptions

24. OA Mandates: Plan S
• Plan S designed by Robert-Jan Smits & Science Europe,
announced on 4.09.2018, to come in force in 2021
• cOAlitionS funders originally planned to force scientists to publish
in full OA journals only, other routes virtually impossible
• Subscription model to be abolished, learned societies to “bite the
bullet and go Open Access”
Marc Schiltz and Robert-Jan Smits Image source: EU Commission

25. Preprints are a better way!
• Your own manuscript can be published
online, gratis, with DOI before or
during submission to a journal
• Negative/contradictory results
welcome
• Preprints are not peer-reviewed
• Most journals accept preprints and
some even allow direct preprint
submission
• Preprints can be rejected for
plagiarism and non-research

26. Preprints work!
 Much bad science appears as preprint. But it is swiftly debunked,
ridiculed and rarely makes it into peer-reviewed journals
 The most dangerous COVID-19 studies appeared in peer reviewed
journals, or as data-free press releases only!

27. You have the power to make science better!
• Preprint your research
• Never compromise your own research integrity
• Do not work with bad scientists
• Engage in post-publication peer review
• Expose irreproducible and bad science
• Report suspected research misconduct
• They are more afraid of you
than you of them!

28. Do not rely on authorities to solve things quietly
• Sometimes, it’s the authorities themselves who engage in misconduct
(university rectors, institute directors, journal editors etc)
• Letters to editor almost never work
• Make things public: Publicly available valid criticisms are much more
difficult to ignore
• Whistle-blowers should consider anonymity
when reporting data integrity concerns
• Once it’s on internet or even in media,
the snowballs starts rolling

29. Thank you!
Website: forbetterscience.com
Slides: slideshare.net/LeonidSchneider
Email: leonid.schneider@gmail.com
Twitter: @schneiderleonid

30. Coronavirus and bad science

31. Coronavirus and bad science
 COVID-19 brought bad science and our tolerance for it into the
spotlight
 mRNA vaccines are being pushed without proper testing or even
scientific basis
 Phony COVID-19 cures are pushed by real scientists: re-purposed
drugs, various supplements, stem cells, nanoparticles, female
hormones, internal UV-light, gamma irradiation, vitamin D, even
cheese

32. Cigarettes against COVID-19!
 Bad, stupid, dangerous science was always there. But during COVID-19, it takes
center stage.
 French clinical researcher Zahir Amoura and Jean-Pierre Changeux, star of Institut
Pasteur, suggest tobacco products as preventive therapy against COVID-19. Based
on their opinion piece published as preprint.
 Made international news

33. Didier Raoult and Hydroxychloroquine
There is no sane reason why HCQ was picked as COVID-19 panacea. But Didier Raoult
from IHU Marseille is expert in tropical infectious diseases, born in Africa, and an eager
user of malaria drug chloroquine

34. If academia only acted on Raoult‘s misconduct and
bullying…
 Raoult is a known abusive bully who
specifically targets women
 He is a vengeful narcissist with a need for
personality cult who does not allow any
opposition, by people or by scientific results
 He protected a vile racist sexual harasser,
ridiculed victims and even re-installed the
sacked abuser
 French authorities and the scientific
community knew everything, but let Raoult
keep his power
 Raoult was found guilty of research misconduct and banned by American Society
for Microbiology (ASM)
 He then turned to publish in journals he controls (like now, with HCQ)

36. Utter meltdown of a rotten system
 Surgeon Sapan Desai is a fraudster and liar, but he always played the system by
making powerful friends
 He created Surgisphere, a database of thousands of hospitals, out of his bum
 In team with some high-ranking researchers, Desai published 2 fraudulent COVID-
19 papers in NEJM and The Lancet. Latter claimed HCQ was killing people.
 If only Desai did not fake about HCQ, or faked HCQ effect in opposite direction,
these papers would not be retracted, but cited thousand-fold (while murdering
thousands).