Image sleuth faces legal threats

doi:10.1126/science.372.6546.1021

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.372.6546.1021
	Image sleuth faces legal threats
	Cathleen O'Grady
	2021-06-04
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Elisabeth Bik has built a career out of hunting for evidence of errors and misconduct in science. Now, for the first time, scientists she has challenged are threatening legal action. Lawyers representing one or more authors who have published on the benefits of “healing energy” have demanded she retract her critiques of that work and apologize. And a lawyer for Didier Raoult, a controversial microbiologist at the Hospital Institute of Marseille (IHU) Mediterranean Infection in France, has accused her of harassment and blackmail. More than 1400 researchers have signed an open letter—and more than 3000 others have signed a petition—supporting Bik in the wake of the threats. The letter reflects a concern that “legitimate scientific criticism can be squelched by behaviors that go beyond scholarly debate,” says University of Virginia social scientist Brian Nosek, one of its authors. In March 2020, Bik, who specializes in identifying manipulated images in scientific papers, blogged about her concerns with a widely publicized paper Raoult published on the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which former President Donald Trump and others promoted as a cure for COVID-19 but which failed to show benefits in large, rigorous clinical trials. She posted her critiques—and concerns about other papers of Raoult's—on PubPeer, an online forum for feedback on scientific papers. Bik says she then faced months of harassment on Twitter from Raoult's colleague, IHU structural biologist Eric Chabrière, and from anonymous accounts. Most of the tweets question whether Bik is being paid by pharmaceutical companies and whether she profited from alleged securities fraud at microbiome testing startup uBiome, where she worked from 2016 to 2018. Other tweets have attacked Bik's appearance and threatened “justice” in “a real prison” in France. Most frightening, Bik says, has been the doxxing—publication of her home address by both Chabrière and anonymous accounts. Raoult and Chabrière did not respond to requests for comment. The episode is “bringing to science what has already been brought to lots of other areas—doxxing, threats, and intimidation,” says Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. In a September 2020 French Senate hearing on the country's pandemic policy, including its use of hydroxychloroquine, Raoult denied ever having committed fraud, but admitted there were errors in a small fraction of his work. PubPeer now has comments on 258 papers on which Raoult is an author. Bik says she has flagged image problems, ethical questions, and other concerns in 63 of the papers. Raoult's lawyer, Brice Grazzini, told Science he filed a complaint against Bik with the French public prosecutor in April, although Bik has not been notified or charged, and it's not clear whether the French legal system will act on the complaint. Grazzini told the tabloid FranceSoir that an avalanche of notifications from PubPeer—sent automatically when a paper is flagged as problematic—constitutes harassment; responding to these and to questions from publishers has taken IHU researchers “an insane amount of time,” he said. Rasmussen, however, sees no evidence of harassment and says Bik was using the appropriate channels to voice her concerns. “If she was driving past his house and stalking him, or threatening or writing him personal emails, maybe there would be some basis for harassment.” Grazzini also says Bik offered to stop criticizing IHU studies if the institute paid her—a move he says constitutes attempted blackmail. Bik says he is misrepresenting a Twitter exchange she had with Chabrière, who asked her to declare any ties with pharmaceutical companies. She responded with a link to her Patreon account to clarify that pharmaceutical companies do not pay her, but that she does accept fees from universities and scientific publishers to investigate suspicious images. She says she jokingly offered to investigate IHU's papers for a fee. In April, Chabrière tweeted a screenshot of a document naming Bik and Boris Barbour, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure's Institute of Biology who helps run PubPeer, as the subjects of the legal complaint. The tweet—now deleted—included Bik's full home address and was the first she heard of the legal threat. The second threat is from at least one unidentified member of a research team behind a series of papers that reported beneficial effects of the Chinese art of Qi Gong, or cultivating “life energy.” Last week, Bik, who has critiqued the papers on PubPeer, Twitter, and her blog, received emails from two lawyers threatening legal action if she doesn't retract her posts and emails to journals about the work and apologize in writing to the authors. In the open letter, which addresses the legal threat from Raoult, Nosek and his cosignatories call on institutions such as universities and funders to protect whistleblowers. Rasmussen, however, notes that independent contractors like Bik don't have institutions to protect them. “Our system of scientific reliability shouldn't depend on someone who's trying to make a living with her various consulting gigs,” she says. Mike Rossner, a data manipulation consultant, says “people who have the authority to request the source data underlying the published images” should step in to investigate Bik's concerns. That includes institutional research integrity officers and journal editors. The support expressed for Bik in the open letter does not hinge on whether her concerns prove valid, Nosek says, although he thinks many are credible. “Her work is serious and genuine. That does not mean that her work is infallible,” he says. “But it does mean that she should be able to do it without being harassed and maligned beyond normal scholarly debate.”
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
URL	查看原文
引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/329849
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Cathleen O'Grady. Image sleuth faces legal threats[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Cathleen O'Grady.(2021).Image sleuth faces legal threats.Science.
MLA	Cathleen O'Grady."Image sleuth faces legal threats".Science (2021).