Frontiers has had bad provlems with this, so I am not surprised that they quietly retracted an article so long after you notified them.

The Lancet editors' misconduct led to a global health crisis. Their decade-long failure to retract the Wakefield article made them responsible for the modern anti-vaccine movement and the related conspiracy culture that helped to elect Trump. They are hypocrites for protesting their creation. 2/2

The Lancet editorial staff covered up Andrew Wakefield's vaccine fraud, so it is difficult to stomach their new role as defenders of research integrity. I know this article addresses a different issue, but The Lancet editors caused so much damage by covering up the Wakefield fraud. (1/2)

PubPeer Network Mob? That isn't as catchy as the PubPeer Gang 😂

You are correct. This is a deeply rooted problem and will take a huge effort to fix it.

Famous "rainmaker" scientists must support other scientists so that the extent of the problem & the politics at play cannot be hidden from public scrutiny. Similar to WaPo: academic integrity dies in darkness.

True! One way to make scientists care is by making them aware that a lot of their funding comes from public stakeholders' taxes - if the public is unhappy with how their money is spent, then public funding might disappear. Scientists who need this funding must pressure their institutions to change.

I hear you and my experience is sadly consistent with this, but somehow I am still optimistic that we can convince more honest scientists to take action 🙂 We can increase awareness in the next generation of scientists - nobody tells them during grad school that they need to be aware of these issues.

@retractionwatch.com Why don't you investigate universities' internal inquiries/investigations when unredacted reports of these processes are available to you? The more frequently that corruption within the academic black box is reported, the more likely it is that this process will change.

I was given the report by a member of the U of Toronto admin who read it.

I agree with you: retaliation against people who report fraud and corruption in universities is real. This must also change, but if honest scientists do not report evidence of corruption then nothing will ever change. (3/3)

This report's contents and the evidence I submitted show that the internal inquiry process enables fraud. If public stakeholders and the scientific community were aware that the 17th highest ranked university in the world operates this way, this will create pressure for the system to change. (2/3)

Universities refuse to share. In this case, the U of Toronto ran an inquiry into my complaint of fraud & concluded the author did not commit fraud. U of T admin gave me the full inquiry report: it proved the authors made false statements & the inquiry administrator misrepresented the evidence. (1/3)

@clare-dnag.bsky.social - the story of my PhD experience.

@spottingthespot.bsky.social - We must promote public stakeholder awareness of the academic black box in which universities operate. One strategy to accomplish this is to release the unredacted internal inquiry/investigation reports like I did here, comments #10 & 13:
pubpeer.com/publications...