Welcome Retraction Decision from the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, and Hopefully Future Policy Revisions to Be Announced

I have posted two times (here and here) about the deeply misguided decision by the editorial management team of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics not to retract a fraudulent, obviously "antivaxx" propaganda piece, article. On invitation, I have also summarised my opinion on this matter at the Daily Nous philosophy blog. In all of these posts, I have strongly underscored the otherwise very promising track and strong reputation of this journal, the importance of this for the critical place of global health and developing country perspectives in bioethics scholarship, and my strong wish for a revised course by the IJME editorial management. It is therefore with the greatest satisfaction I have been reached by the news that the same management has now revised its judgement, and decided to retract the article in question, inviting publicity also from the widely read Retraction Watch blog.

The retraction note is rather brief, but open and honest, and it speaks well of the integrity of the editorial management that it does not try to hide its own mistakes, or that the retraction occurred only as a result of pressure from the journal's editorial board and external commentators. It signs off by promising further elaborations in coming editorials. My hope is that these will set out clarified policies and routines that ensure that the journal in the future will keep strictly within its own declared area expertise and scholarship of "all aspects of healthcare ethics and the humanities, relevant to and/or from the perspective of India and other developing countries". This simple policy will save the IJME from any further scandals of the sort it has just escaped, and be a pillar for what I hope will be a further positive route of development of this otherwise excellent journal.

However, on one point, I strongly disagree with the position set out by the editorial management, and that is its apparent decision to continue to hide the identity of the proven fraudulent author that used to call him-/herself "Lars Andersson", falsely claiming affiliation to Karolinska Institutet. The editors are hereby promoting further research fraud by this person, undermining both other journals and research institutions from protecting themselves against this person's future activities. It also impedes appropriate disciplinary action to be taken by the academic or other institution to which the person formerly known as "Lars Andersson" is indeed affiliated. Finally, it impedes any analysis into the vested or other conflicts of interests linking to this person's activity to attempt to peddle fraudulent antivaxx articles. The argument by the editors, that it has promised the author to keep his/her identity a secret is not only invalid. The action makes the editors complicit in any further research fraud undertaken by this person. The promise itself is morally void, as the editors had no business making it in the first place, their primary obligation being to the research community, and not to proven research fraudsters. It is my sincere hope that the further elaborations on editorial policy promised, possibly by help of further dialogue with the journal's editorial board, will lead to revision of judgement also regarding this particular point.

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Indian Journal of Medical Ethics Troubles Deepen as Editorial Team Responds to Criticism

Only the other day, I posted about "highly problematic" publication ethical decisions of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, and even more problematic positions taken when challenged. After having raised the issue in some closed facebook groups in my field, the initial concerns I had about the direction taken by the journal, have now deepened considerably.

First, the entire managing editorial team – excluding the main editor of the journal, Amar Jesani – has now responded for a second time to the criticism of the Karolinska Institutet president Ole-Petter Ottersen, in a facebook post. I'm quoting it verbatim here, and adding screenshot below as proof of authenticity:

IJME Working Editors Respond to Prof Ole Petter Ottersen, President, Karolinska Institute, Sweden.
Response to the blog post of Prof Ole Petter Ottersen, President of the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden: http://blog.ki.se/…/comments-from-indian-journal-of-medica…/
Prof Ottersen has raised important issues on the role of journals and of research institutions in ensuring ethical research and informing medical practice. However, his attack on The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics in the name of publication ethics is flawed, and indicates a reluctance to engage in discussion on the scientific issues. He has also conveniently ignored the Karolinska Institutet’s own role in permitting misconduct by its researchers.
Good editorial practice:
While journals should make every effort to confirm the author’s identity and affiliation, this is not routine editorial practice even among well-established journals. The Journal of Internal Medicine (published by Wiley) and Vaccine (published by Elsevier) have carried material by “Lars Andersson”, without checking his institutional affiliation and despite his use of a non-institutional id.
Editors’ accountability:
The comment by “Lars Andersson” ( http://ijme.in/…/increased-incidence-of-cervical-cancer-in…/ ) was reviewed by an external, international subject expert, an external statistician, a working editor with expertise in research methodology (Mala Ramanathan) and the manuscript editor (Sandhya Srinivasan) before being accepted for publication. When we were notified of the deception regarding the author’s identity and affiliation, we immediately removed the KI affiliation from the journal. We have explained our justification ( http://ijme.in/articles/statement-on-corrections/… ) for retaining the article on our website, and maintaining the author’s anonymity.
The need to enable scientific debate:
Prof Ottersen does not explain how anonymity prevents scientific debate on an analysis of publicly available data. And he does not explain how “false affiliation” is relevant in the context of the IJME article which no longer carries any affiliation. He says that “leading researchers with intimate knowledge of the vaccination field have identified serious flaws in the published report and its conclusion, thus questioning the quality of the review process”. However, neither he nor these unnamed researchers have stated what those flaws are. The attack on IJME for maintaining the author’s anonymity ​appears to be to avoid scientific debate. We invite critical commentaries on the paper by “Lars Andersson” towards advancing the scientific debate on the issue at hand.
The suggestion that false affiliation and anonymity are preventing scientific debate is a red herring. Does Prof Ottersen’s indignation comes from his inability to personally target the person questioning the HPV vaccine?
The need for institutional accountability:
We suspect that, in addition to using the author’s anonymity as a red herring to prevent scientific debate on the article, KI has reasons to whip up sentiments against IJME to hide glaring failures of governance in the institute in relation to "Lars Andersson".
Between 2014 and 2017, two internationally reputed journals, JoIM and Vaccine, published correspondence from "Lars Andersson" who reported affiliation to KI. The letters in JoIM were in response to a paper in the same journal. A perusal of the JoIM articles shows that "Lars Andersson" had filed a complaint of research misconduct in 2016 against six authors of this paper, five of them affiliated to KI. The complaint was with KI for about a year, after which it investigated these allegations without confirming the identity of the complainant. Let alone a journal published from India, KI did not verify, on its own, the existence of a person on whose complaint it was acting. It would not be wrong to assume that the complainant made a prima facie case for the allegations; without this, KI would not have launched the investigation. In this background, and with KI providing legitimacy to "Lars Andersson", how could JoIM and Vaccine have suspected that "Lars Andersson" did not exist in KI? And how could this question have ever occurred to IJME?
The prevention of deception by an author on the name or affiliation requires the joint efforts of many stakeholders, including journals. While IJME has taken full responsibility for what has happened, the attacks on it in the name of publication ethics cannot wish away the ongoing governance failure in the KI, and cannot be used to prevent scientific debate on an article which nobody has proved to be unscientific, except by innuendo.

Sunita V S Bandewar, PhD, MHSc (Bioethics), Independent Senior Research Professional; Working Editor, IJME. Email: sunita.bandewar@gmail.com
Rakhi Ghoshal, PhD, Assistant Professor, United World School of Law, Gandhinagar INDIA, Consultant Researcher, King’s College, London, UK; Working Editor, IJME. Email: rakhi.ghoshal@gmail.com
Vijayaprasad Gopichandran, MD, PhD, Primary Care Physician, Reproductive Health Cliic, Rural Women's Social Education Centre, Kancheepuram District, Tamil Nadu; Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, ESIC Medical College and PGIMSR, Chennai, INDIA; Working Editor, IJME. Email: vijay.gopichandran@gmail.com
Sanjay A Pai, MD, Working Editor, IJME. Email: sanjayapai@gmail.com
Mala Ramanathan, MSc, PhD, MA; Working Editor, IJME. malaramanath@gmail.com
Sandhya Srinivasan, MA, MPH, Independent Journalist, Mumbai; Consulting Editor, IJME. Email: sandhya199@gmail.com

Screenshots (click to enlarge):

This response demonstrates the obvious fact that the editorial team of IJME is apparently unaware of the most elementary principles of academic publication ethical principles. They are unaware of the importance of why proven research fraudsters should have their publications retracted, and they believe that the importance of being able to correctly identify authors and their academic affiliations of research articles is "a red herring" (see my former post for some of the most obvious reasons for why it is not). This leads me to conclude that the editorial team lacks the necessary competence to manage a well regarded bioethics journal. Which helps to explain why IJME has gone so sadly astray.

However, it does not end there. In the closed Facebook group Bioethics International - a forum for explicit professionals and dedicated researchers in bioethics, or advanced students on track to become any of those, a number of additional points were importantly raised, in addition to the ones in my original post. First, the fact that IJME decides to publish an epidemiological article in a politically highly contested field, where research fraud from "antivaxxers" have been numerous, in an ethics journal. The whole point of having journals organised by fields is that this can guarantee appropriate scientific competence among the journal editorial management, e.g., to select suitable reviewers for manuscripts, and to appropriately evaluate reviewer comments. This is very obviously not the case regarding the fake author paper in the IJME: One of the working editors that is named as having handled the paper, Sandhya Srinivasan, does not hold a PhD, while the other, Mala Ramanathan, is a reproductive health specialist with nil research competence in the topical area of the paper (albeit she does hold an Msc in statistics according to informal reports). The only quality screening of the paper was made by one unnamed external expert on statistics, andMala Ramanathan. That is, no research expertise on vaccination, on HPV and cervical cancer, or on epidemiology ever assessed the paper, despite the fact that this was the topic of the article, and the fact that there is plenty of expertise available in those fields. This is, I would say, serious and willful editorial mismanagement of the publication process of a bioethics journal.

In the further discussion in the same Facebook group, several members of the editorial team engaged themselves, and demonstrated some further causes for concern, besides what has already been mentioned. First, there were repeated assurances about Amar Jesani, the IJME editor who was responsible for the decision not to retract the fraudulent article, and who also made the initial, ill-conceived response to Ole-Petter Ottersen, having the highest of ethical competence and integrity. When people reacted to that with the appropriate "so what, that does not justify what he's done", the working editors started to rave about a lot of other journals being conned too, basically trying to say that, because of that, the IJME would be right not to retract a proven fraudulent article. All of this, of course, just adds to the already amassing reasons to view the IJME as an unserious academic journal, that has sadly departed from its formerly very promising track for becoming a well regarded publication forum in bioethics. I sincerely hope that the journal's editorial board can swiftly step in and set this sad development right, and if it so does, I will be happy to revise my judgement.

But before I end, there is a final twist to the ongoing scandal. As is made clear by the editor, Amar Jesani's first response to Ole-Petter Ottersen, he now is aware of the real identity of the fraudulent author calling him-/herself "Lars Andersson" and claiming affiliation to Karolinska Institutet in order to peddle an antivaxx junk article to what has now proven to be a substandard journal. However, instead of disclosing this identity – what expertise this author supposedly possesses and what research affiliation he or she holds – the editor Amar Jesani continues to keep this a secret. As I said in my former post, the bogus after-the-fact excuse that the author must be shielded from criticism isn't worth the paper it was written on. In addition, as this is a proven research fraudster, it is in the publiuc interest and the interest of the entire research community, to be informed about who this person is. What is worth noting, however, is this: Amar Jesani very obviously finds the combination of the following three actions very important to sustain: (1) let a fraudulent antivaxx article stay in an ethics journal, (2) shield the proven fraudulent author of this article from public exposure, (3) have is editorial team do its best to deflect further critical inquiry into this matter, especially critical assessment of Jesani's own actions. I just let that stay there as food for thought until this matter develops further.

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Highly Problematic Stance on Fake "Antivaxx" Authorship By the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics

It is a recognised challenge of my research field, bioethics, to include and empower researchers and institutions from low- and midlle-resource settings. Since a few years, the leading journal of Bioethics, runs the side journal Developing World Bioethics to address this issue, and over the past few years a number of journals have appeared, based at institutions outside of the most affluent parts of the world with a natural focus on bioethical issue of relevance to such settings, as well as global health related issues. One of these is the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, that has quickly been rising in the ranks and attracting respect for its consistent work.

However, very recently the IJME has been dragged into potential scandal. First, the editor, Amar Jesani, decided to publish an article by a fake author, claiming fake credentials and affiliations, of an obvious antivaxx junk article of the sort that antivaxxers – just like tobacco-industry sponsored scientists used to do regarding the dangers of smoking – are constantly trying to peddle to various journals to create an image of "scientific controversy" around the use of vaccines to fight infectious disease and build public health. The fakes were all very easy to detect, and already the fact that the "author" was not using the email-domain of, and has no profile at the webpages of, the institution (Karolinska Institutet) to which he claimed affiliation should have rung immediate alarm-bells. But then, when this is pointed out, and the journal is alerted to this research fraud, the editor Amar Jesani decides not to retract the article! Instead, the editor appears to have decided to trust the author's obviously bogus explanations for his (?) fraud, and to attempt to counter a, to my mind, quite sound statement on the matter from the Karolinska Institutet president, Ole-Petter Ottersen.

The bogus explanations and Jesani's expression of sympathy with them, and Ottersen's stringent response, is to be found here. This very surprising and ill-conceived action of Jesani is potentially extremely damaging for the IJME, and in effect risks to soil the reputation of the entire field of bioethics. The fake author's attempt at justifying the fraud is that he/she has to be anonymous to protect him-/herself from persecution for unpopular views. This, of course, is not even worth the scrap of paper it was scribbled on. The real role of the fraud is to block any investigation into conflicts of interests (the antivaxx movement is nowadays a flourishing industry of quackery), other activities of the author that would undermine confidence in the article's content, and the fact the author lied to the editor, and offered the explanation only in retrospect when the scam had been uncovered should, of course, mean that the editor should have no trust in what the author is claiming. This is a proven fraudster, and should be treated as such. Just as authors lying about ethics approval should have their papers taken out, authors who lie about other things of relevance to the evaluation and assessment of the research have their papers removed. As Ottersen says in his second blog post: an editor of an ethics journal should know this. The editorial board of the journal should immediately and strongly recommend its editor, who has obviously let his personal prestige lead him astray in this matter, to revise his position and act according to the high publication ethical standards expected of a bioethics journal that aspires to be well regarded.

Let me, lastly, comment on the possible need for author anonymity for research articles. The afterconstructed reason brough forward by the fake author and that Jesani surprisingly buys, is the idea that is often practices within news reporting. Where, eg., a newspaper may protect sources by keeping them confidential. However, that also means that whatever story is built on this, needs to present suffient additional public evidence, that is open for scrutiny, in order to compensate for the loss of control following source anonymity. This has not taken place in the case of the fraudulent article. Also, the whole spinn about author/source confidentiality is obviously a lie in the present case: Had the author had any such plan, he/she would have honestly and openly contacted the IJME editor about it, and Jesani could have pondered - bringing in the editorial board - the issue. Had they decided to approve such a request, this would have brought with it extraordinarily strong obligations to check the author credibility, CoI, etc. This is not what occurred, however. What occurred is that a con-man defrauded the journal, and the journal editor then decides, against any common sense, to trust said con-man. Unbelievable!

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This is Huge: Serious Research Misconduct in Almost 3/4 of FDA Inspected Clinical Trials – Hidden by Both Inspecting Agency and Researchers

First I had problems taking it in: Almost 75% of US clinical trials inspected over a period of 15 years by the Food and Drug Agency, responsible for upholding regulation in this area, display serious misconduct of various kinds. It can't be that bad, I asked myself; if it was, I would have heard something about it before – research ethics in medicine being one of my areas of expertise! Except that I wouldn't, since neither the FDA nor the researchers in question have reported these stunning findings to the outside world. That is, until Charles Seife, an MD but also a journalist, decided to have a look at FDA documents of some of the made inspections between 1998 and 2013. What he found is reported in a recent article in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, where out of originally 600 trials, 101 where identified where the FDA had found strong reason of issuing complaint, and among these:

Fifty-seven published clinical trials were identified for which an FDA inspection of a trial site had found significant evidence of 1 or more of the following problems: falsification or submission of false information, 22 trials (39%); problems with adverse events reporting, 14 trials (25%); protocol violations, 42 trials (74%); inadequate or inaccurate recordkeeping, 35 trials (61%); failure to protect the safety of patients and/or issues with oversight or informed consent, 30 trials (53%); and violations not otherwise categorized, 20 trials (35%). Only 3 of the 78 publications (4%) that resulted from trials in which the FDA found significant violations mentioned the objectionable conditions or practices found during the inspection. No corrections, retractions, expressions of concern, or other comments acknowledging the key issues identified by the inspection were subsequently published.

 Seife concludes:

The FDA has legal as well as ethical responsibilities regarding the scientific misconduct it finds during its inspections. When the agency withholds the identity of a clinical trial affected by scientific misconduct, it does so because it considers the identity to be confidential commercial information, which it feels bound to protect. However, failing to notify the medical or scientific communities about allegations of serious research misconduct in clinical trials is incompatible with the FDA’s mission to protect the public health /... /

To better serve the public health, the FDA should make unredacted information about its findings of research misconduct more readily available. The agency should make sure that any substantial evidence of misconduct is available to editors and readers of the scientific literature /.../

... most of the burden for ensuring the integrity of the research in the peer-reviewed literature falls to the authors of the articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals. Currently, there is no formal requirement for authors seeking to publish clinical trial data to disclose any adverse findings noted during FDA inspections. Journals should require that any such findings be disclosed.

The nail on the head if there ever was one, and Seife is backed by an editorial, signed by three strong voices from the Yale and UCSF medical schools. FDA is liable to serious criticism for not proactively informing the scientific and medical communities, as well as the general public, of these matters. Journals which not immediately effect the standard indicated by Seife would deserve equally serious criticism. But the worst of all is the fact that such journal policies would be needed in the first place. 

The by far heaviest burden of criticism befalls those researchers, many of which have not only committed scientific fraud and serious ethical breaches, but have all in addition consciously choosen to actively surpress highly relevant information about the quality of the studies they have conducted. Not only is this relevant for the publication screening at journals to safeguard the quality of scientific publications. It is even more relevant for the assessment of the results reported in publications for the purpose of, e.g., licencing or decisions on clinical use, or public funding. These researchers have sold their scientific credibility and honour to whatever bidder (in the vast majority of cases, one suspects the pharmaceutical company funding the study) have incited them to keep mum. People doing such things have no place in either the academic or the medical community.

Seife has a popular report of the significance of his study in Slate, here.

This is, as far as I can see, a major research ethics and regulatory scandal, and it might just be hiding an even larger one. For, given the frequency of serious misconduct now revealed, one may very well ask what would be found if FDA was to cast its inspection net wider and inspect even more trials. And what would be the outcome of similar procedures in, e.g., Europe or Asia?

New details on the University of Minnesota psychiatry morass: suspicion of vital documents falsified and hidden from court

More on what I posted on a few days ago with regard to a thickening enigma around the ethics of the so-called CAFÉ study – involving Astra-Zeneca and associated with at least one death – at the psychiatry department of the University of Minnesota, here.

To read the new developments, looki here! In short, as new evidence occurs the suspicions about a bona fide coverup, featuring falsified consent documents and other vital pieces of evidence hidden from court investigations – are strengthened.

I repeat myself when under stress: At the very least, the University of Minnesota should have a slight urge to look into to this, not least since it appears to be imperative according to its own regulative statutes.

More will follow, I'm sure.....

Continuing stinks out of University of Minnesota Psychiatry: If it looks like it, smells like it and sounds like it, at least it deserves an inquiry...

This is just to point interested readers to what looks more and more as a multi-layered bona fide research ethics scandal at the psychaitry department of the University of Minnesota, involving at least one death and possible falsified patient documents in order to fake proof of consent. My US colleague Carl Elliott has been covering this mess for a long time, patiently trying to have the university's own research intergrity administration take hold of the case, and work it as they should. However, instead of doing what a university in this situation is supposed to do – namely acting in a prudent and transparent way to undo any unsubstantiated suspicions – it continuously acts to sweep whatever crap it is they feel they need to hide under a dirty, old mat of hollow and increasingly unsound or even obviously invalid bureaucracy blabber.

Is it as simple and disgraceful as one commentator at Carl's blog suggest, that:

...the University of Minnesota will never look into these issues because they are scared too death of what they might find, or actually might have already found. /..../ The University at this point has no option but to stay the course of denial, for to give in and admit fault would open the flood gates...

??

Read more here.

Updates on this case will follow as they appear by way of Carl.

The Consequences of Research Fraud

It may occurr to some that the research fraud cases that I have been posting about recently are mainly of interest to the insiders of academia and merely harming their esoteric sense of justice. This piece, pertaining to the scandal of German medical researcher Joachim Boldt that I posted about a while back, in today's Telegraph provides apt illustration of how this is far from what is actually at stake.

Deteriorating Bioethics, Plagiarism, Amateurism and Open Access

My research speciality, Bioethics (including medical and health care ethics (+ law and policy), research ethics of the life sciences (+ law and policy), public health ethics, and so on) has been an expanding, successful and increasingly influential international academic field since the early 1980's. While moral philosophers, like myself, have played an essential part in this process (people like Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Dan Brock, Ruth Faden, Richard Hare, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Daniel Callahan, Jonathan Glover, Mary Anne Warren, Bonnie Steinbock, Tom Beauchamp and Frances Kamm come to mind), there has always been a consciousness in the field of the importance of having also far-reaching theoretical analyses being informed by accurate facts and up to date empirical research and theories. With time, more and more bioethics has come to be descriptive and empirical rather than theoretical and normative – applying some presupposed (as a rule not very well worked out) normative standard as a backdrop to investigating phenomena that are supposedly ethically relevant against that background (the endless series of studies of the practice of informed consent against the backdrop of "the four principles" is the most obvious example). Gradually, this development has led to a situation where more and more authors of bioethics papers lack any deeper education or training in the theoretical subtleties of the field (at best they have some sort of biomedical education topped up with a relevant ethics master or some-such, but often not even that). In parellel, more and more bioethics papers are being published not in the renowned specialised journals of the field, but in regular medical or health research journals and numerous new "open access" journals of uncertain repute.

Now, while I have been hearing more than just a few grumpy comments on this development among my more theoretically inclined colleagues, I am not of the opinion that it is necessarily for the worse. It may be viewed as a natural consequence of the success and relevance of the field that a division of labor is developing, where some concentrate on theoretical detail, analysis and innovation, others  doing the empirical investigations of relevance against the background of formulated theories and yet others engage in the tricky activity of moderating the application of bioethics research results in the context of policy making. However – and this is a big but – as in other areas of science and research, such developments are for the better only to the extent that the integrity of the field is not compromised as an upshot. Such a threat may arise in many ways, one of which being lack of intellectual contact and interaction between the "labor-parts" – for this reason, I'm a big supporter of multidisciplinary team research, where the theoretical, empirical and pragmatic sides of the field are forced to interact in the very process of doing the research. Another source of the threat is that the development brings into bioethics some bad habits and disgraceful ingredients that – alas – have been part of the biomedical research world for a long time. I'm thinking about things as journals with questionable quality standards and research fraud.

Quite recently, both of these sources of a threat against the integrity of bioethics research have been exemplified in the form of a multi-layer scandal in relation to a paper published in the "open access" journal BMC Medical Ethics. The paper in question, "End-of-life discontinuation of destination therapy with cardiac and ventilatory support medical devices: physician-assisted death or allowing the patient to die?" by Mohamed Y Rady and Joseph L Verheijde, was recently retracted because it was found to repeat substantial passages from a paper by Franklin Miller, Robert Truog and Dan Brock, published in the very well-seen journal Bioethics. At the research ethical blog Retraction Watch, Franklin Miller describes how BMC Medical Ethics conceded to retracting the article only after some substantial pressure from the legal department of Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk, editor in chief of Bioethics, demonstrated his outrage at the attitude of BMC Medical Ethics by cross-posting the Retraction Watch piece on his own Ethx Blog,  just a few days ago.


As noted in a further comment made at The k2p Blog, one of the main points made by Retraction Watch is that the BMC Medical Ethics retraction note is not honest about what has actually occurred. The note reads:

The authors have voluntarily retracted this article [1] and it is no longer available for online public display because portions of the article are similar to a previous publication [2]. While there was no intention to use pre-existing work without appropriate attribution, the authors nonetheless extend their apologies to Dr. Miller and all others concerned.

So, let me get this straight: The article plagiarised another article, but – then again – it didn't, since the plagiarisors claim that there was no intention to plagiarise. Well, how very odd then, that same (not) plagiarisors find reason to apologise to the (not) plagiarised authors.... eh....., for not plagiarising their article, I guess. As The k2p Blog puts it, "[w]hen is plagiarism not plagiarism?", immediately answering:

Apparently when the editor of the journal BMC Medical Ethics finds that a paper published in his own journal has copied large chunks from a different (competing?) Journal.

And, ending the post on a similar note:

...perhaps it is only plagiarism when other Journals copy material published in yours but not when others are copied and published in your Journal?

Amen. Together with Franklin Miller's account of the lack of willingness to even acknowledge any reason for retracting Rady's and Verheijde's paper in spite of irrefutable evidence, we here have as good an illustration as we want of the poverty that may result when "scientific journals" are able to mushroom under the protection of the presently sacred buzz-headings of "open access" and "online". As we all know, of course, this format for a journal is a financial prerequisite for having these sort of below sub-standard periodicals in the first place, at least as long as bioethics does not become tasty prey for the Big Pharma sponsored "manufactured scientific journal" industry, that have been scandalising biomedical scientific publication in recent years. 

Further evidence of the dungeon-like quality standard of BMC Medical Ethics is provided when inspecting it's website; priding itself as it is with a shining silver medallion at the top, announcing this fine journal's "unofficial impact factor" to be a handsome 1.93. Who's that when he's at home?, you may rightfully ask. The mystery clears, when clicking the shiny little badge – lo and behold:

Do journals published by BioMed Central have Impact Factors and are their citations tracked?
 
Yes; for any journal to have an Impact Factor, however, it must be tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI) for three years. Although many BioMed Central journals are tracked by Thomson Reuters, others are still relatively new. The tables below show those journals that are already tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI) and so already have Impact Factors, and journals that are due Impact Factors for which we have calculated their unofficial Impact Factors.

In short, BMC Medical Ethics does in fact not have an impact factor, but the management of the journal apparently hopes that it will one day receive one (to be precise, as transpires further down, some time in 2012). In the meantime, the same management has done its own little dabbling with its pocket calculator, coming up with the nice little "unofficial impact factor" that, just as so happens, holds out BMC Medical Ethics as a more influential journal in the field than longstanding leading periodals such as Journal of Medical Ethics, Bioethics, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Health Care Analysis, Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics and Hastings Center Report. Truly impressive (footwork of a con-artist excuse for a scientific journal editor, that is)!

Now, although – as I said – the "open access" and "online" options opened up by the internet are presumably prerequisites for this sort of scam, it is of course quite possible to have journals that are both open access and online that meet the quality conditions one would expect of an academic journal. The problem is, with friends in the trade such as BMC Medical Ethics (and, one is prone to suspect, the whole Biomed Central lot) these journals need no enemies. The only way in which a researcher has any chance of deciding the actual quality is to inspect a sizable amount of paper and submit them to intense scrutiny. I can vividly hear the bitter laughs rattle the offices and rooms of my colleagues, as they ponder this suggestion for what to do with their precious time...

Well, I thought, then maybe I'll do it a bit for them! Because, as revealed by Udo Schüklenk, the retracted paper is in fact not fully retracted – or, to be precise, it is indeed still available through the BMC Medical Ethics server [RETROSPECTIVE NOTE: this has now been taken away, but the paper can still be accessed here], just not to be found via clicking a link in the table of contents. Not that we needed any more evidence of the morass that is BMC Medical Ethics, but there we are!

But anyhow, how about the paper itself? Well, you are all welcome to read it and make up your own minds, but to me this paper illustrates exactly the sort of threats to the integrity of bioethics research due to lack of adequate knowledge and skill mentioned earlier. Here allowed to be made public thanks to scam operations such as BMC Medical Ethics. The whole paper is based on the assumption that there is a comprehensive, sharp and self-evidently morally relevant distinction to be made between "active" killing ("physician assisted death") and "allowing" patients to die (without that assumption, the authors would be unable to make the argument they try to make and advance the thesis they want to advance). Recognize that one, perhaps? Isn't it one of those conceptual traps that are laid in the shallow rhetoric of high school debate contests that a minimally trained and educated bioethicist is supposed to spot and unpack instantly by applying some conceptual analytic ointment? Yes indeed, it is (and, as it happens, this is what Miller, Truog and Brock do in their paper). I'll tell you, Rady and Verheijde wouldn't have passed my basic course on medical ethics or bioethics theory. In spite of one of them waving the flag of an affiliation to a center for biomedical ethics, this is the indisputable work of amateurs whose only accomplishment is to send a stinking cloud of incompetence over my favored field of inquiry.