Is it somebody else’s problem to correct the scientific literature?

Last week was rather eventful, starting with 3 days at the French Society for Nanomedicine conference in Strasbourg with several members of the NanoBubbles project (including Nathanne Rost and Maha Said who presented posters on post-publication peer review and replications in bionano) and many interesting discussions. I skipped the Tuesday morning sessions to give a seminar at the Institut Charles Sadron, where, 20 years ago, I defended my PhD. The event was recorded and you can now watch it on YouTube (below). The conference also coincided with the publication (Monday afternoon) in the French Newspaper Le Monde of an investigation of a major integrity case in the laboratory that I had joined two years ago. I am the whistleblower. I am quoted in the article noting that 20 months after reporting this case, most of the articles have not been corrected nor retracted. Indeed, of the 23 articles for which I reported concerns, nine have been “corrected”, one has been retracted and thirteen remain untouched. Remarkably, the retracted article has been republished in a predatory journal. The corrections are problematic both for technical reasons (e.g. this one or this one) and because of the lack of transparency (the editors receiving the correction requests and the readers reading those corrections would have been unaware of the real reason why this correction was necessary in the first place). The question of how and when corrections are appropriate in cases of breaches of research integrity would need to be further explored by journals and research institutions. PLoS One’s conditions to publish a correction includes the requirement that there are no concerns about the integrity or reliability of the reported work. Other publishers have much more ambiguous policies. In any case, given the current lack of appropriate action 20 months after my initial reports to institutions, I have now posted on PubPeer my concerns in full so that everyone can make up their own mind and the authors can respond if they wish to do so.