An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction – his eighth – in a separate publication.

As we and others have reported, Raoult’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik – whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself. 

The allegations prompted an ethics investigation by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products into Rault’s research during his tenure at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, in Marseilles, which he led between 2011 and his retirement as director in 2022. That inquiry found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

The 101 expressions of concern come for papers Raoult and his colleagues published in New Microbes and New Infections. Here’s an example of one of the EoC’s, for “Genome sequence and description of Anaerosalibacter massiliensis sp. nov.,” which Raoult’s group published in March 2016:

Concerns have been brought to the attention of the journal regarding potential non-compliance with Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies regarding the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants. 

The journal is investigating the concerns as detailed in the recent Publisher’s Note [1], including contacting the authors, in line with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and Elsevier’s policies. 

The Expression of Concern will remain appended to the article until the investigation has been completed. If the journal can reach a conclusion, it will take any action that is deemed necessary. If the journal determines that it cannot reach a satisfactory conclusion with the information available to it, a further notification will be published to update the community.

That publisher’s note, which posted last November, reads: 

Concerns have been raised about a number of articles authored by researchers affiliated with Aix-Marseille Université IHU – Méditerranée-Infection, Marseille that have been published in New Microbes and New Infections (NMNI). The substance of these concerns relates to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants.

New Microbes and New Infections, supported by Elsevier’s Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics (RI&PE) Centre of Expertise, has launched an investigation into these allegations, following due process outlined by the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE) by confidentially consulting with the authors and, where necessary, liaising with the institution where the studies took place.

We have appointed Dr. Jim Gray, Consultant Microbiologist at the Birmingham Children’s and Women’s Hospitals, U.K. in the role of independent Publishing Ethics Advisor, to support the investigation.

If necessary, corrections will be made to the scientific record when the investigation into each article is completed, in accordance with the journal’s Publishing Ethics policy.

Other researchers found issues with the ethics approvals of 456 studies published by researchers affiliated with the IHU Méditerranée Infection, including “248 [that] were conducted with the same ethics approval number, even though the subjects, samples, and countries of investigation were different.”

Raoult also had nearly 50 papers in PLOS journals subjected to expressions of concern for ethical issues in 2022.

The new retraction involves a 2017 paper in Scientific Reports titled “Culturomics and Amplicon-based Metagenomic Approaches for the Study of Fungal Population in Human Gut Microbiota.” According to the notice: 

Editors have retracted this Article.

After publication of this paper concerns about ethical oversight of this study were brought to the attention of the Editors. The paper cites approval from an institutional ethics committee in France, but samples used in this study were also sourced from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Niger. The Authors were not able to provide documentation of approval from ethics committees in these countries, or of compliance with local regulations regarding the use of such samples in research.

Stéphane Ranque, Esam I. Azhar, Muhammad Yasir, Asif A. Jiman-Fatani, Didier Raoult, and Fadi Bittar disagree with the retraction. Ibrahim Hamad and Hervé Tissot-Dupont did not reply to the correspondence from the Editors.

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A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.

The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying  “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”

The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.

The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting: 

a statement as a note added, elaborating on experimental details and additional data sets that previously did not pass the selection criteria. We have followed these recommendations and uploaded the documents to the Zenodo repository (https://zenodo.org/records/10676715, which can also be accessed as Ref. [81] in the original paper. A summary of that note added is this MEMO, which includes a summary of key points. 

Marcus, who along with his co-authors hired an attorney to respond to the Practice Committee, which had commissioned the expert report, also said:

We hope that the Science editors will also accept the recommendations of the [expert panel].

We asked Marcus whether he agreed with the report’s statement that “the authors should have been more forthright and explicit with readers and with referees in describing their success rate in fabricating devices that showed simple tunneling characteristics and had MZM behavior and, by flagging alternatives and uncertainties, more evenhanded in their discussion of interpretations.” He said:

The quote you mention is not part of the conclusions. It was part of a longer commentary and taken out of context.

Frolov and Mourik told Retraction Watch:

We are pleased that Science forced the University of Copenhagen to conduct a more extensive investigation into this Microsoft/University of Copenhagen paper than the Niels Bohr Institute previously did when it resoundingly exonerated the authors. As we predicted, the new committee found more data from many more devices than the Niels Bohr Department Chair admitted existed in his inquiry, none in our view replicating the claimed Majorana discovery.

They continued:

Unfortunately, despite these unambiguous findings, the new committee (three of the four members of which had what we regard as conflicts of interest in the case) did not find the courage to recommend retraction, instead making the argument that everyone inflates their work to get into Science. It is unfortunate to see such cynicism and it is not fair to the editors who were told this was a big breakthrough. In our assessment, the claims in this paper amount to falsification and have been thoroughly debunked not only through our analysis, through separate publications in Nature and Science, but through the analysis in this new report as well. We stand by the original criticism we posted on Zenodo in 2022 that the authors’ additional data not shown in the paper disproves their claim of a Majorana signal.

Next up: The University of Copenhagen’s Practice Committee has notified the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct (DCRM) that it intends to decide on the case “on its own, unless the DCRM decides to call in the case for decision as a matter of research misconduct.”

A Nature paper on the same subject – sometimes referred to as a ‘Majorana’ particle – was retracted in 2021.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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