The retraction by Nature of the Samaha work: is Gaetan Burgio correct on who is responsible for improper submissions to journals?

DIANA KWON of The Scientist discusses the retraction by Nature of a paper co-authored by oncologist Nabil Ahmed and Heba Samaha. Of note within her text:


But starting last October, a few weeks after the paper was posted online, comments about potential image manipulation in the article began to appear on PubPeer, and the issue quickly caught the attention of scientists on social media.

Gaetan Burgio, a geneticist at Australian National University who posted a widely circulated Tweet about the manuscript, notes that the extent of alleged image duplication identified in this paper was “quite exceptional.”

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According to the retraction notice posted today, the authors are pulling the paper “due to issues with figure presentation and underlying data.” All the authors, except Samaha, the first author, agreed with the retraction.

“Unfortunately, issues were identified in the presentation of several figure panels and the underlying data [in the paper],” Ahmed writes in an email to The Scientist. “I promptly notified the office of research at Baylor College of Medicine, which is looking into the cause of these issues.”

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Some commenters on both PubPeer and social media suggested that the duplicated images should have been caught by peer reviewers. But Burgio believes that the responsibility lies with the publisher, not the reviewer. “I think it’s on the publisher to ensure that the paper doesn’t contain any image duplication or plagiarism,” he says. “It’s unfair to rely solely on the reviewer to police the paper.”

Nature currently conducts random spot checks of images in manuscripts prior to publication. “If concerns about a figure in a Nature paper are raised, we have software tools that enable us to evaluate images in detail,” a Nature spokesperson writes in an emailed statement to The Scientist. (The spokesperson also noted that the journal could not comment on individual articles for confidentiality reasons).

Some journals, such as the Journal of Cell Biology and The EMBO Journal, have implemented procedures to screen figures in every article prior to publication. “This [practice] is absolutely admirable,” Ferguson says. “How to screen really carefully for image manipulation prior to publication is something that most journals will have to address.”




As to the issue of plagiarism, IPBiz disagrees with Burgio: it is the people who have knowledge of the field (the reviewers) who should be most responsible for identifying the copying of material, whether it is slavish word-for-word duplication or more subtle forms of intellectual theft.
IPbiz has already posted examples of plagiarism identified by readers, who are familiar with the given field, rather than publishers, who are not.