Whistleblowers, responding to

A meta-analysis was published in a journal ahead of print, and then subsequently in print. Several months later, the journal was contacted by a faculty member at a university not connected with the study. The reader outlined three general concerns with the meta-analysis. The concerns were discussed by the editorial team, including the statistical editor, and it was decided that the overall results of the meta-analysis were not affected. The complainant persisted in the critique, which was relayed to the authors of the original article. The first author provided a detailed response to the issues raised; the journal did not request an erratum at that time.

A discussion followed between the complainant and the editorial office about the extent to which the issues raised were errors or ‘a matter of opinion’. One error was clear and was corrected by an erratum. In the journal’s view, the other issues raised were open to interpretation. The complainant was invited to write a letter to the editor, but they declined and persisted that an erratum should be published or that the journal should consider retracting the article.

Because some of the points of critique were of general interest to the field, and also in an effort to resolve the issue of the continued critique by the complainant, the journal decided to publish an editorial comment authored by the editor in chief and the statistical editor. The editorial comment paraphrased the complainant’s concerns and added a few additional considerations relevant to the interpretation of the meta-analyses. The complainant was given the opportunity to review the editorial comment and the journal also asked his permission to be acknowledged for bringing the issue to the journal’s attention. The complainant gave his feedback, which was incorporated, and also his permission to be acknowledged. The journal also gave the authors of the original article the opportunity to respond to the editorial comment. The authors wrote a scholarly response and also provided re-analyses of the data when excluding the contested studies. The editorial comment was published, together with the acknowledgment, the author’s response and the erratum.

Before the publication of the editorial comment, the journal held a conference call with the complainant. The complainant had published a paper on a related issue in the preceding year, but the study published in the journal was different from the previous meta-analyses from the complainant’s own group. This had not been disclosed to the journal previously. It became also clear that the complainant had not contacted the authors of the article to share his concerns, and the journal encouraged him to do so.

Subsequently, the complainant raised new issues with the original meta-analyses, which they discussed with the authors. The complainant insisted that an additional erratum was needed; the authors of the meta-analysis are now preparing a second erratum. The complainant was again invited to write a letter to the editor, and again declined.

The journal is concerned that the second erratum will not satisfy the complainant and that this issue will not end unless the journal agrees to retract the original article. The assessment of the journal is that there are insufficient grounds to retract this article. One of the complainant’s recent emails to the authors says that they will contact the authors’ university and colleagues and the funding agencies that support the work of this research group about the purported errors made by this team. The complainant has also requested that the journal involves the publisher’s "ethical committee dealing with the publication process".

Question(s) for the COPE Forum

• What is a journal’s responsibility to minimise potential damage that readers can do to the reputation of the author where the reader disagrees with the editorial team and the authors of the original article on whether an error has been made versus a difference in opinion?
• What are the options for a journal to respond to (unreasonable) requests from readers regarding the content published in the journal and/or request to retract a paper if the editorial team considers the concern not sufficiently problematic to result in retraction?
• What could the editorial team have done to better respond to the reader’s concerns?

A journal received an allegation of scientific misconduct from an anonymous individual stating they were from the group that had written the paper (Institution-1, there are two institutions involved in this research). The email stated that the scientific bases of the article were unreliable. The paper was currently with the authors who were revising the paper after the first round of review, and additional experiments were required.

The editors followed-up with the whistleblower requesting more information and their identity. The whistleblower emailed back, concealing their identity, but provided additional information, highlighting a specific component of the research as unreliable.

Institution-2 (the one that was not claimed by the whistleblower) was informed of the whistleblower. Institution-2 responded by saying that the authors believed there was an initial problem with the data used, but these had been updated and were not fabricated. Institution-2, however, was not the institution that carried out the experiments in question.

The editors made the decision to obtain more information. On resubmission of the paper, the three original reviewers looked at the manuscript but were not told about the whistleblower. All three were satisfied with the changes made to the paper and approved publication. A fourth reviewer was asked to look at the paper and told about the anonymous whistleblower. This reviewer found no clear evidence of fraud, but he could not assess the experiments in question. This reviewer did, however, raise new concerns about technical deficiencies in the work. Aside from fraud, these new issues made it unsuitable for publication in the journal.

The editors requested outside assessment from researchers with knowledge of the work to redo the informatics analyses to see if the raw data (included with the paper) gave the same results as the processed data. Again, there was no clear evidence of fraud, but there was difficulty in complete reproducibility due to poor methods descriptions and lack of access to all of the data.

At this time the whistleblower sent an email recanting his/her original statement and saying they have assessed the work and the authors have made the appropriate changes to fix everything. This was an odd email as there had been no change in the manuscript since the resubmission.

The editors ultimately decided to reject the paper based on remaining concerns of misconduct and the heavy criticism of the fourth reviewer.

The authors from Institution-1 requested a meeting with the editors. At this meeting the authors: expressly denied misconduct; showed the editors pages of data from the experiments of concern; and provided the editor with a copy of an email from an anonymous whistleblower that the leader of the group had received 2 days before the journal editor had received their anonymous email. This anonymous individual claimed to be from Institution-1, and stated that one of the authors (from Institution-1) had visited their institution and removed data.

An additional oddity is that the email addresses from the whistleblower to the editor and to the authors were created to indicate they came from the institutions claimed. Investigation of the email origins showed that the two anonymous whistleblower emails came from the same individual, not two different individuals as claimed.

Question(s) for the COPE Forum
• How should editors act on a tip from an anonymous whistleblower, where there is uncertainty about the unknown person's goals and that, should institutions take punitive action without investigation of the whistleblower’s intent, careers could be heavily impacted.
• If the institutions, when informed, decide to take no action, do the editors have a responsibility to investigate to get a better sense of whether they should further push the institution given the authors can simply submit a paper elsewhere where those editors will not know about the potential for misconduct.
• Due to the importance for the career of individuals on this paper, can the editors aid the authors submitting elsewhere, given that the whistleblower lied, but there is no way to disprove fraud. Or should the editors provide the information about the whistleblower to the institution.