While on tour in Australia in 2010, my friend, David Archibald said to me “Ocean Acidification is the last refuge of the climate scoundrels”. It appears he may be right. It also appears that James Cook University has a real research integrity problem, that Dr. Peter Ridd has pointed out, and got fired for daring to say it.
Kip Hansen covered this last week, but it deserves another bump because members of the scientific press are taking notice. From Science Magazine:
Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt
Members of the Clark group say they will soon publicize the alleged data problems on PubPeer, a website for discussion of published work. And they say they thought long and hard about whether to discuss their concerns with a reporter while investigations may be ongoing. “In my experience, whistleblowers, myself as well as others, are shamed for talking to the media before an investigation has concluded misconduct,” says Josefin Sundin of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the last author on the Nature replication paper. “But why is that? If an investigation even takes place, it can drag on for a very long time. If you know that data have been fabricated, why is it considered the right thing to do to stay silent about it for months and even years?”
Something smells for sure.
Full story here.
Of course, anyone who claims to be a scientist who also promotes the wrong idea that peer-review somehow implies scientific validity MUST be condemned in the strongest terms as anti-scientific. But moreover, we need to tear down the incentive system created by publication journals themselves. It’s time to go to online publishing of all government funded science, with open review, and end the paywalls and gate-keeping that journals now employ. They have long since lost their usefulness, and charge libraries and universities buttloads of money for subscriptions, and they extort graduate students to pay to publish, when no such payment would be needed in an open, online database for all science papers. University libraries should encourage their own students to publish online and to forego the “prestige” of once-but-no-longer-prestigious journals. Then, replication can once again resume it’s rightful role in the science process, free to all auditors and scientists wishing to build on the work of others.
There is no excuse for making taxpayers pay to read research funded by taxes!
Good luck to them.
The history of whistleblowers shows truth is secondary to other considerations for bureaucracies.