Caught Our Notice: Forgot to make your article open access? It’ll cost you (with a correction)

Title: Industrial antifoam agents impair ethanol fermentation and induce stress responses in yeast cells What Caught Our Attention: When authors decide they want to make their articles freely available after they’ve already been published, how should publishers indicate the change, if at all? Recently, Ross Mounce (@rmounce) thought it was odd a Springer journal issued a […]

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Biotech journal pulls well-cited review that plagiarized from several sources

A biotechnology journal has retracted a 14-year-old review after an investigation concluded that the authors had plagiarized from numerous sources.   The last author of the paper — which has been cited 289 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science — told us the authors took a few lines from other reviews, and unintentionally left off the […]

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A bacterium may be anti-fungal, but it’s not anti-retraction

The authors of a paper on an anti-fungal bacterium couldn’t ward off a very common problem: plagiarism. The people credited on the paper, published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, apparently weren’t the original authors, according to the retraction note. We’re not sure who the original authors are. The retraction note doesn’t elaborate much: The Editor-in-Chief and the […]

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De-coli: Plagiarism leads to retraction of highly cited recombinant protein paper

The authors of a 2005 article on E. coli in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology have lost the paper because they recombined it from previous work. The article, titled “Strategies for efficient production of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli,” came from a pair of biochemical engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, in New Delhi, India. According to […]

Paper by Bristol-Myers Squibb researchers retracted for “unsolved legal reasons”

applied micro biotechA group of researchers at Bristol-Myers Squibb has had a paper retracted for reasons we can’t quite figure out.

All the notice for “Simultaneous expression of antibody light and heavy chains in Pichia pastoris: improving retransformation outcome by linearizing vector at a different site,” published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, says is:

This article has been retracted due to unsolved legal reasons.

It’s unclear what this means. The ten authors of the paper are at Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Biologics Process Sciences division of its Global Manufacturing and Supply operation in East Syracuse, New York. Neither the corresponding author, the editor of the journal, nor Bristol-Myers Squibb has responded to our requests for comment.

Pichia pastoris is a yeast that, according to Wikipedia, is

widely used for protein expression using recombinant DNA techniques. Hence it is used in biochemical and genetic research in academia and the biotechnical industry.

“Unsolved legal reasons” seems to be a favorite at Springer, which publishes the journal. We reported on two other retractions for the same “reason” last month.