The Great Beyond

Something is always lost in translation!
The primary reason for retraction of the review in Annals of Botany cannot be citation malpractices alone. The main reason is poor and even wrong science as established by prior published science. The appearance of the review was in violation of whatever COPE stands for, of which Annals of Botany is a member. Therefore the complaint was directed at editorial malpractices. The reasons for malpractices were many, all of which were spelt out to the Chief Editor with a request to look into the academic questions and practices, particularly the wrong science. That he refused to do speaks for itself.

As an editor of the Springer journal, Physiology and Molecular Biology of Plants (PMBP), which published some of the most recent papers of Sitaramam relevant to his complaint to COPE, and also as a former secretary and currently Executive Council member of the Society for Scientific Values, India, I am appalled at the attitude of the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Botany. His summary dismissal of the complaint within 24 hours clearly shows that he did not study the complaint (and the references associated with it) properly, did not try to investigate it or get the written response of the various people involved in authoring/reviewing/editing the paper in question, and did not show any sensitivity towards an aggrieved author. It is almost as if the editor is unquestionable!

Atkins and Macherel wrote a review in Annals of Botany profusely citing their own work and a few others (including some member(s) of the editorial board), effectively distributing credit among themselves for highlighting the role of mitochondrial respiration in plant response to drought. Therefore, the issue here is much more than citation and one of credit appropriation. Sitaramam has a series of articles in this area over the past couple of decades in many international journals of repute. These articles encompass the interdisciplinary theoretical basis as well as experimental evidence on the role of respiration in drought. His group claimed to have defined a phenotype for plant drought response for the first time and therefore have the right to expect due credit for it. The review by Atkins and Macherel not only deprived him of that credit but also apparently obfuscated many issues, terms and definitions and did not clearly define the phenotype or genotype for drought, according to Sitaramam. Yet, the fact remains that the same journal that rejected one of Sitaramam's research papers on this topic, published such a review by Atkins and Macherel. Clearly, different standards of peer review must have been applied to the acceptance of Atkins and Macherel's review and the rejection of Sitarmam's earlier paper. That paper eventually appeared in PMBP, and should have been cited, along with many other papers of sitaramam and possibly others, to provide a truly objective review of the subject, as per the standard norms of publishing ethics. If all these errors happened inadvertantly, the editor should have thoroughly looked into both sides and come clean, rather than brushing it under the carpet.

As authors, most Indians know that one of the common reasons for rejecting (or asking to revise) a paper or review from journals abroad is that - it did not citing some authors or did not consider some relevant literature. This is often the prerogative of reviewers or editors to get their own papers or those of their favourite colleagues cited. But authors do not have the privilege of questioning the citation practices of others, or complain about the marginalisation of their own work, as the response of the editor of Annals of Botany seems to suggest. This is precisely why Sitaramam's accusation of the "buddy" system in science publishing seems justified.

Therefore, there are many charges within the complaint of prof. Sitaramam, including, but not limited to: 1) inappropriate claim/attribution of credit, 2) citation malpractice, 3) differential standards of peer review of Sitarmam's rejected paper and Atkins-Macherel's published review, 4) Editorial partiality and mutual citations 5) Unaccountability and non-transparency of the Editor, among others.

My editorial dilemma arises in defining what should I do as an editor when I discover that the work published in my journal is usurped by another author/journal, which seems to be the case here.

Best regards,
N. Raghuram

I am a co-author of the paper titled "The Energetic Basis of Osmotolerance in Plants: Physical Principles", published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, 189: 333-352 (1997), and Prof. Sitaramam was the senior author. This paper considers various aspects of water stress tolerance in plants that includes salt stress and drought, and concludes that the physical basis for tolerance is due to the inherent energetics principles conferred by the mitochondrial respiration. This paper also describes that a measure of respiration can serve as an index of quantitative proxy variable for water stress tolerance for genotype classification, and a model to such a variable. It is not surprising these days authors deliberately exclude giving credits to fellow scientists in order to claim novelty to their work. In these days of highly competitive world the onus of correcting such behaviors by authors rests clearly with the 'referees' and the journal editors, because, the referees and the journal editors have various tools (public databases, author and subject indices for nominal charges etc.) at their disposal to detect such 'omissions' without having to go through stacks of journals or indices. But when the distinction of a player and the arbiter starts blurring you expect more of such incidents to pass unchallenged in the garb of 'anonymous review'.

I am not surprised that Sitaramam has faced discrimination by a British Journal. Another article (S.P.Modak and F.J. Bollum)on detecting DNA loss due to single and double strand breaks in degenerating nuclei, detected in situ using Terminal transferase, was rejected by a major British journal which actually published few months later a paper using far substandard immunological technique from a British author. We then published it in as part of a series of articles in ExpCellRes. In fact, we were the first to show DNA strand breaks during nuclear degeneration in lens fibre cell death (Modak et al, 1969, Modak & Perdue, 1970; Modak & Bollum, 1970, 1972) using terminal transferase and further supported it with in vivo chromatin degradation DNA ladder (Appleby & Modak, PNAS, 1977; Modak & Beard, NAR, 1980) and keratinizing epithelia (Modak & Traurig, Cell.Differen.,1972). While this was being published, someone conveniently injected the term “Apoptosis” to mean cell death. From there onwards none of our work is cited because we did not use the word apoptosis as it didn’t exist as a ‘keyword’. The fact that everything said about DNA breakdown during apoptosis was already shown by us was conveniently ignored. It is a sad reflection that when we ‘clarified’ the lens for others to ‘see’, they instead turned ‘Nelson’s eye’ to where from the idea came. While Whewell lamented that the person who coins a new word in science is ridiculed or is not noticed, he did not anticipate that this becomes the best strategy to steal claim! Yet another instance concerns our NAR work on 2 dimensional DNA gel electrophoresis that was submitted an year before it actually appeared, got hijacked in form of a methods paper on S 1 endonuclease mapping in Methods in Enzymology. In yet another case (Ghatpande et al., 1993) showing that abnormal development induced by LiCl was directly correlated to inhibition of embryonic cell proliferation, was rejected by “Development” stating that ‘we don’t publish data on teratogenesis’. Such offhand remarks are a standard from journal referees in the buddy system. Is there a way of avoiding the cancer of referees stealing the work they are supposed to review and how do we prevent the editors from colluding? This is even more relevant when we are dealing with work than has direct application to the issues like drought and yield, central to the economy of developing countries that multinational are trying to manipulate through false claims for financial gains.
The fact that the misappropriation or even stealing the credit of discovery is a world-wide phenomenon does neither absolve nor allow complacency on the part of Annals of Botany or any other journal, British or otherwise. I wonder how many of our self righteous colleagues, from the west or the east, share these concerns!

Prof. Sohan P. Modak.

A requiem for publication ethics.
The COPE has delivered its views on the matter. It summarized that, “In the present instance your grievance appears to be about your belief that this journal has engaged in institutionalized discrimination against third world researchers. Clearly you are dissatisfied with the review (of Atkins and Macherel).” I could hear Sir Humphry Appleby talking about how organizations primarily cater to their relevant constituencies, the British editors as in this case. “In this particular instance it is our view that the matter is essentially an editorial dispute and not one which COPE is empowered to consider, even if all the formal opportunities for complaint have been used.” COPE has clearly stated in its website that its member journals should adhere to editorial norms. And yet, they write, “However, we recognize and accept that the journal is not under any obligation to publish it: although COPE encourages debate and the correction of the scientific record, we also respect an editor’s right to choose what to publish.” COPE took great pains to ensure that Annals of Botany need not even invite a rebuttal, subject of peer review of course.
This squarely brings us to an open admission that editors are outside the purview of any public scrutiny, since the only alternative would be to consider that those from developing countries are only to be seen and not heard. Since I have been heard by many other journals, I presume that existing structures neither have the teeth nor the inclination to cater what matters most, correct science and propriety. They serve their own groups, making a mockery of any scrutiny. I must admire the way COPE has given reprieve to Annals of Botany so efficiently removing any possibility of any scrutiny, in spite of the fact that we have supplied all the published papers that explain why the basis of Atkins & Macherel review is incorrect. Science does not matter. The readers should know this.