Readers may recall some ethics objections I raised in my complaint letter to UWA and Psychological Science, and also sent to Frontiers. It seems Frontiers agrees.
This statement was posted on their website today:
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Rights of Human Subjects in Scientific Papers
The retracted Recursive Fury paper has created quite a blogger and twitter storm. A sensational storm indeed, with hints to conspiracy theories, claims of legal threats and perceived contradictions. It has been fury – one of the strongest human emotions – that has (perhaps understandably at first sight) guided the discussion around this retraction. Not surprisingly though, the truth is not as sensational and much simpler.
The studied subjects were explicitly identified in the paper without their consent. It is well acknowledged and accepted that in order to protect a subject’s rights and avoid a potentially defamatory outcome, one must obtain the subject’s consent if they can be identified in a scientific paper. The mistake was detected after publication, and the authors and Frontiers worked hard together for several months to try to find a solution. In the end, those efforts were not successful. The identity of the subjects could not be protected and the paper had to be retracted. Frontiers then worked closely with the authors on a mutually agreed and measured retraction statement to avoid the retraction itself being misused. From the storm this has created, it would seem we did not succeed.
For Frontiers, publishing the identities of human subjects without consent cannot be justified in a scientific paper. Some have argued that the subjects and their statements were in the public domain and hence it was acceptable to identify them in a scientific paper, but accepting this will set a dangerous precedent. With so much information of each of us in the public domain, think of a situation where scientists use, for example, machine learning to cluster your public statements and attribute to you personality characteristics, and then name you on the cluster and publish it as a scientific fact in a reputable journal. While the subjects and their statements were public, they did not give their consent to a public psychological diagnosis in a scientific study. Science cannot be abused to specifically label and point out individuals in the public domain.
It is most unfortunate that this particular incident was around climate change, because climate change is a very serious threat for human civilization. But the importance of the subject matter does not justify abandoning our principles.
Frontiers’ core mission is to improve peer review. One principle that we follow is that scientific publishing should sit in the hands of scientists. Frontiers implements this principle by supporting scientists to operate the peer-review process from the beginning to the end. Frontiers remains faithful to this mission, despite the risks that comes with it. We will stay the course because we fundamentally believe that authors should bear the full responsibility of submitting papers with the highest standards and that scientists should bear the full responsibility of deciding what science is published. After publication, the community is engaged and a post-publication review naturally follows. Post-publication review is facilitated by the Frontiers’ commenting and social networking platforms. This process may reveal fundamental errors or issues that go against principles of scholarly publishing. Like all other journals, Frontiers seriously investigates any well-founded complaints or allegations, and retraction only happens in cases of absolute necessity and only after extensive analysis. For the paper in question, the issue was clear, the analysis was exhaustive, all efforts were made to work with the authors to find a solution and we even worked on the retraction statement with the authors. But there was no moral dilemma from the start – we do not support scientific publications where human subjects can be identified without their consent.
Editor-in-Chief, Frontiers
Source:
http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Rights_of_Human_Subjects_in_Scientific_Papers/830
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So Frontiers claims to be a qualified authority on climate change and declares it to be a big danger. Perhaps if they knew that climate change is no longer around, they would have a different opinion. Probably not. They go where the grant money goes.
I would like to congratulate Mr. Markam and ‘Frontiers’ for taking a well justified and ethical position, AND then standing behind that position. If more journals and scientists display such adherence to the truth and ethics (in all areas, not just climate science) the world would be a better place.
So Lewandowsky knew why Frontiers retracted the paper but failed to tell his friends at SkS who then told the world they’d been withdrawn because of threats of legal action. Nice man, nice people.
Meh… they lost me at : “It is most unfortunate that this particular incident was around climate change, because climate change is a very serious threat for human civilization.”
Whether the topic is climate change or the mating habits of the Slovenian Three-toed tree lemming is irrelevant. The larger issue was that Lewandowsky tried to ramrod a paper through that was poorly conceived and unethical.
Frontiers writes: “…the importance of the subject matter does not justify abandoning our principles.”
Lew, Dana, McKewon, Mann, et al. disagree.
(On the other hand you have to have some principles before you can abandon them.)
“Science cannot be abused to specifically label and point out individuals in the public domain.”
Fortunately, since catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is not science, it is in no danger of violating this position.
🙂
“But there was no moral dilemma from the start – we do not support scientific publications where human subjects can be identified without their consent.”
Good point! I assume UWA has an ethics committee, how did this get past them?
Frontiers certainly got one of the primary issues right. And congrats to them, even if it is for simply following their ethical guidelines. That might not sound like much, but it seems that a lot of folks don’t follow their guidelines these days.
But from Steve McIntyre and others have found, the actual research was both deceptive and wrong (they seem to have gotten lots of their conspiracy stuff from climate friendly websites). The original paper is still up at Western Australia U.
How do we get a full investigation of the way the paper was done? With the paper still up, there are going to be plenty of people still thinking that people who don’t agree with the IPCC and our President might be wacko.
Unless the paper is investigated in an open forum by reputable people, I don’t know how this will change. Perhaps only Australia can now do this?
It would help if they would specify if they’re talking about actual climate change or bogus climate change for the reader to decide whether or not to take them seriously.
Frontiers apparently had no problem with the fact that the paper was a survey conducted by
a person clearly antagonistic towards his subjects and who clearly selected them in a fashion inconsistent with his announced intent.
Very clear and honest position. h/t to Frontiers for their integrity on this.
It is clearly unacceptable to use the scientific literature to slag off your political opponents.
None of this paper was about science , it was a pretence and a farce, whose primary aim was defamation.
I’m sure that Frontiers will be quietly asking themselves why this did not get picked up and thrown out during review process.
” It is most unfortunate that this particular incident was around climate change, because climate change is a very serious threat for human civilization. ”
Well they got that wrong but then they’re psychology journal not a physical science journal.
The truth is , if it was not “around climate change” it would never have been written because the aim of this paper was everything about the politics of climate and nothing about psychology.
Perhaps they will be more circumspect next time Lew tries to sneak gutter snipe into their journal.
RE: Generic Geologist ‘s reference to Slovenian Three-toed tree lemmings.
Ain’t no such creature. It is poor form to insinuate that non-existent creatures are part of Slovenia’s ecology. Now, had you referenced three-toed woodpecker’s, you would have been on sound scirntific ground.
“Frontiers’ core mission is to improve peer review.”
Interesting. One of the reviewers of Lewandowsky’s paper was a journalism graduate student.
Does the Journal consider this choice to be an improvement over peer review found in other journals?
Or, does the Journal consider this choice to be an improvement in matching the expertise of the reviewing peer to the expertise of the researcher?
🙂
“With so much information of each of us in the public domain, think of a situation where scientists use, for example, machine learning to cluster your public statements and attribute to you personality characteristics, and then name you on the cluster and publish it as a scientific fact in a reputable journal.”
This is what the NSA is doing with our meta data. Though, the “reputable journals” are all secret government lists.
It has been fury – one of the strongest human emotions …
Fury is an emotion?
Huh? How are they doing this? This episode may have alerted the editors to be more scrupulous when publishing by making sure some ethical rules are followed, but how does this improve peer review? This statement is mere hand-waving. Improving peer review would involve developing a rigorous process to check data, references, analysis methods, and statistical tests of submitted papers. It would involve developing a stable of reviewers without ties to the author(s) or sympathies biased toward conclusions. It would involve review procedures that are open and transparent to third parties. It would involve guidelines for criticisms and suggesting improvements of submissions.
If Frontiers is really means what it said, then let’s see the plan for doing these things.
I am still having trouble understanding how either the Fury or Moon Hoax paper could possibly be considered as being of sufficient scientific quality to deserve publication in the first place, regardless of any ethical issues.
Well, I know there are risks & risks & all that, as a humble structural engineer I am well aware of risk. However, psychiatrists & psychologists who go around pronouncing this fruit loop or that nut job is fit to re-enter society, where they commit yet another rape, violent assault, murder, & some ordinary decent citizen is deprived of their liberty either temporarily, or worse, permanently, are a law unto themselves. IMHO, they frequently get it wrong more often than they get it right. My daughter’s boyfriend’s father suffered from mental problems for many years, they got worse after he divorced the mother. He suffered from long bouts of depression, & had attempted suicide twice. A few years ago, he became ill once again, this time being sectioned under the UK mental health act. His son & daughter both visited him regularly. On several occasions the father talked of knowing exactly how to behave like a perfect patient to enable him to gain his freedom, & thus kill himself at will. He never really improved, but the son & daughter reported these conversations to the psychiatrists every time it was mentioned by the father that he knew exactly how to behave. The “experts” just told the son & daughter that their father was responding well to treatment & counselling, totally ignoring the pleas from the two children, eventually informing them that they were considering releasing the father back into the community as he was no longer deemed at risk, by the “experts”. Despite being told by the two offspring repeatedly what the father said, they were so “expert” they totally disregarded them. The father was released in the following month after 9 weeks detention. He was dead within the week, the time, place, & means were all pre-planned whilst still detained as it turned out, the “experts” had no idea! The inquest almost a year later took a rather dim view of the experts! Just an observation, that’s all, & a rather costly one at that!
A solution could not be found because the authors WANTED the identities of the subjects to be known. It was a smear paper aimed at shutting down the debate and discouraging people from being sceptical. The problem is you would be smearing a large number of the population who are sick to death of the climate con job.
Why can’t someone be sceptical about the projected high range of warming from the IPCC without being called names? 1.5C is as good as 4C, nobody has a damned idea what the temperature will be in 2100. If nobody knows then there is a debate and doubts are fair game. Just look at the failed projections of the previous IPCC reports, not good.
Col Mosby says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:32 am
And
Generic Geologist says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:36 am
Meh… they lost me at : “It is most unfortunate that this particular incident was around climate change, because climate change is a very serious threat for human civilization.”
Well they did say it was a threat. I, for example, could make a threat to nuke Tehran, but seeing as I don’t possess a nuclear weapon the threat would be hollow. There is a threat of climate change, but on inspection that too turns out to have little validity.
Nothing about the fact that the actual diagnosis was utterly false and created from a fraudulent process of pre-loading due to sending the questionnaire to alarmist blogs in order to create the pre-designed outcome and a refusal of the researchers to share that data then?
It was shoddy anti-scientific work from start to finish and this “ethical” get out, although true, is being used as a “get out of jail” card for the publishers, so that they can avoid the real issue of corrupt and fraudulent “science” being used to wrongly attack the mental state climate realists and to lie and mislead.
Do they do peer review? You published this crap so why were you asleep on the job?
That’s what Lew did and that’s what he wanted.
They take this claim as given, yet they wanted us to take the Lew paper as given since they published the crap. Scepticism worked on Lew. Think about that.
There’s a saying, “What’s shocking about DC isn’t what goes on that’s illegal, but what goes on that’s legal.” “Fury” is “illegal,” but what’s shocking is that “Moon Hoax” is legal.
Another nail in Looney Lewey’s coffin. I suspect he is going to have to hire his own shrink before this plays completely out.
He (and nuts like Nuccy) are displaying classic symptoms of conspiracy ideation and paranoid delusion.
“e do not support scientific publications where human subjects can be identified without their consent.
Henry Markram
Editor-in-Chief, Frontiers”
Kudos