Seems there’s a little too much emotion with this one, Ugo Bardi, who seems to have a burr up his butt for WUWT (in comments to his own article) while completely ignoring complaints like this one.
It is important to note that Mr. Bardi is NOT the editor of Frontiers in Psychology, where Lewandowski’s Recursive Fury paper was published, then retracted. He’s just some guy that works for the same publisher on another publication. His resignation would be akin to some middle level division manager at a company resigning because some other division manager made a decision he didn’t like, even though the decision doesn’t even affect his division.
He writes:
After the recent events in the saga of the paper titled “Recursive Fury” by Lewandowsky et al., I am stating my disappointment by resigning from Chief Specialty Editor of the Frontiers journal
You may have followed the story of “Recursive Fury“, the paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and others that the journal “Frontiers“ had published in 2013. The paper reported the results of a survey that showed that the rejection of climate science was often accompanied by a similar mindset on other scientific areas. So “Climate skeptics” were also found to reject the notion that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus and that smoking causes cancer. A result not at all surprising for those of us who follow the climate debate in detail.
As it might have been expected, after publication, a storm of negative comments was unleashed against both the authors of “Recursive Fury” and the journal. What was unexpected, instead, was the decision to withdraw the paper taken by the editorial board of Frontiers.
I found the behavior of the publisher already highly objectionable at this stage. However, I could at least understand it (if not agree on it). They stated that “[Frontier’s] investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article.” The authors themselves seemed to share my opinion when they said, “The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article”
Unfortunately, now Frontiers has issued a new note where they backtrack from the previous statement and they seem to indicate that they found substantial problems in the paper. The new Frontiers’ note is discussed in detail by Lewandowsky himself in a post titled: “revisiting a retraction“.
…
The climate of intimidation which is developing nowadays risks to do great damage to climate science and to science in general. I believe that the situation risks to deteriorate further if we all don’t take a strong stance on this issue. Hence, I am taking the strongest action I can take, that is I am resigning from “Chief Specialty Editor” of Frontiers in protest against the behavior of the journal in the “Recursive Fury” case. I sent to the editors a letter today, stating my intention to resign.
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You can read his full statement here: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2014/04/climate-of-intimidation-frontiers.html?m=1
h/t to Barry Woods via Twitter
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Ugo needs to go it alone and launch Cassandra.
RokShox – if it was sent from a UWA or Bristol email addr then it may be fair game for a request under the appropriate FOI law, particularly since he’s indicated an intent to destroy correspondence related to university-sponsored work
Has he actually READ Lewandowsky’s papers. Lewandowsky’s first paper is nothing more than a statistically incompetent analysis of an extremely poorly done internet survey! That alone makes it worthless garbage and ought to completely disqualify it from for publication in any reputable journal. His second paper is nothing more than a bunch of quotations from blogs taken out of context used to construct ridiculous speculations that the authors suffer from some kind of psychological disease. If Lewandowsky wants to do silly internet surveys or make nasty comments about people he disagrees with on the internet he should do it on his blog like everyone else. Psychology cannot be regarded as a proper grown up science if this kind of infantile stuff is to be accepted as publishable research in the area.
Ugo Bardi, by his very public resignation ploy, is not serving well the credibility of Lewandowsky. This publicity will tend to keep people thinking of the fatal survey and ethics flaws in the other Lewandowsky paper ‘Moon Hoax’ which is the essential basis of the retracted ‘Recursive Fury’. Ugo Bardi’s unwise PR on resignation reminds the public of the idea of retraction of fatally flawed ‘Moon Hoax’ as well.
I just posted this at Lucia’s Blackboard post on ‘Consent’ in the research done by Lew et al for the ‘Moon Hoax’ paper published by the journal Psychological Science’.
John
” So “Climate skeptics” were also found to reject the notion that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus and that smoking causes cancer. A result not at all surprising for those of us who follow the climate debate in detail.”
Anyone posting here on WUWT like to confess to being a conspiracy theorist? If yes, please indicate if you are a Sceptic or an Alarmist. Also what your favourite conspiracy might be.
Just curious. I know it’s not exactly a very scientific study, but then, neither was the Lew paper.
[snip too stupid to print -mod]
And so WUTW shows its gutless side.
My wife says I would be handsome if I lost my gut. I vote for gutless . . . . . : )
John
John Whitman says:
I don’t know. I like to think of myself as fat and prosperous.
Interesting stuff:
Two more Editors among Frontier’s journals are (allegedly, according to DesmogBlog) resigning over the Lewandowsky saga: Colin Davis (Univ of Bristol) and Björn Brembs (Univ Regensburg)
Don’t know more about any of them, and haven’t found (or looked for) more information.
If the heat keeps up on Frontiers, perhaps they’ll admit that the real reason they rejected Fury is that they took a second look at Moon Hoax and decided they didn’t want to be associated with such a loony author.
rogerknights
Two things:
Being an ‘editor’ at Frontiers doesn’t mean all that much, there are very many of them, and the duties and tasks they carry out are quite limited. In Ugo Bardi’s case, the whole ‘journal’ seems to consist om seven publications, five of which did not have Bardi as or among the authors. Essentially all other authors were ‘editors’ too. Notable is that the ‘Editorial Board’ consists of 170 individuals, while all in all there are a total 12 authors published in that journal.
But more importantly, I too think that the stated reasons for the final take-down of ‘Fury’ are just the minimum information justifying that decision. I most certainly would hope that they factored in how exceedingly bad and deceitful both ‘Moon Hoax’ and ‘Fury’ are, that (at best!) there is no substance at all in that ‘data’, and thus realized that neither ‘science’ nor Frontiers are served by association with Lew and his scribblings …
And I would expect them to never state so in public. Actually I was surprised by how explicit they were in their 2nd statement distancing themselves from the Lew-paper (and its versions) detailing what they wanted (instead!)
Anyone who quits the editorial board over this the Frontiers journals are better off without.