Among the 25 papers that Zhan Qimin has been questioned about, they can be roughly divided into three categories: repeated experimental images, violations of animal experiment ethics, experimental results or common sense errors, and some primers are invalid or missing.

Zhan Qimin (Photo source: Peking University News Network)

Staff reporter/Li Xiangma and Du Wei

Overseas academic anti-counterfeiting website PubPeer recently exposed Peking UniversityExecutive Vice President, Peking University Medical SchoolDirector, and Academician of the Chinese Academy of EngineeringZhan Qimin The paper is suspected of being "falsified". Among the 25 papers that Zhan Qimin has been questioned about, they can be roughly divided into three categories: repeated experimental images, violations of animal experiment ethics, experimental results or common sense errors, and some primers are invalid or missing.

On PubPeer, Zhan Qimin’s team has currently responded to four papers and made corrections to four others. Among the 25 papers, 15 papers have similar or repeated experimental images. Regarding one of the papers with duplicate images, Zhan Qimin's team responded that it was because different experiments mistakenly placed the same experimental picture. For another paper with duplicate images, the author replied that the images were actually different because the resolution was too low. In another paper, the author apologized and said that an error was caused when sorting the images. But for more papers, Q&A has not yet been conducted. The person in charge of the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of Peking University Medical School told "China News Weekly" on the phone, "We are now understanding the situation." "China News Weekly" asked Zhan Qimin himself for confirmation on this matter, but had not received a reply until the time of publication. Among the

25 papers, two articles were accused of violating the ethics of animal experimentation and have not yet received a reply from Zhan's team. They were both published when Zhan Qimin was the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the vice president of Peking Union Medical College. One of the articles was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation sponsored by the American Association for Clinical Investigation in 2010. On PubPeer, a comment posted an image of 6 experimental mice in the paper and asked, could the author clarify the tumor size obtained in this study? Are these consistent with your institution’s animal ethics guidelines? In this paper, Zhan Qimin is the corresponding author of and .

Another article was published in "Scientific Reports" under Nature Publishing Group in 2015, with Zhan Qimin as its co-corresponding author.

Elizabeth Bicker, an American academic anti-counterfeiter, is a skeptic of this paper. She commented that the tumors in the experimental mice were too large, far from the 1 cm claimed by the author. Can the author clarify the size of the tumors obtained in this study? size? Are these ethical to animals?

According to "Animal Experiments Causing Ethical Controversies on Animal Welfare" published by Gao Hong of the Institute of Medical Experimental Animals, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in " Science and Technology Herald ", in order to reflect the therapeutic effect of drugs without causing serious harm to animal health, the industry The generally accepted maximum diameter of tumor volume in mice is 1.5 cm.

An article published in the "Chinese Journal of Medical Frontiers" in 2010, with Zhan Qimin as the corresponding author, was accused of going against common sense. Zhan's team explained this and believed that it did not affect the conclusion. Wang Chenguang, a former professor at Peking Union Medical College and engaged in the research and development of immunotherapy drugs, commented in an interview with DeepTech that the questions raised by the doubters could not confirm that they were fraud, but the response from Zhan Qimin’s team revealed the chaos and disorder of his laboratory’s research management. .

The publication time of these 25 papers spans from 1998 to 2019, and runs through Zhan Qimin’s tenure as a senior research assistant at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in the United States to the executive vice president of Peking University. The papers were published in "Nature Communications", "Heredity and Genomes" In magazines such as "Journal of Cell Death and Disease" and "Clinical Cancer Research", the impact factor of most journals is within 10. The doubters, except for one of the articles by the well-known anti-counterfeiter Bi Ke, the other 24 articles were mainly written by two anonymous accounts.

Bicker said that for these problematic papers, including those on tumors in rats and mice, they should be withdrawn, and on this basis, the authors should never be allowed to conduct animal experiments again. Additionally, as with most other papers, authors are required to send corrections to the journal, and they will need to take extra care in the future.

Previously, Cao Xuetao, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of Nankai University, was also questioned on the PubPeer website by Dr. Elisabeth Bik, a former assistant researcher at Stanford University , who had image anomalies in many papers.In several academic anti-counterfeiting incidents, a new generation of anti-counterfeiting websites represented by PubPeer has also come into the spotlight. Is the

academic anti-fraud website “self-defeating”?

PubPeer, which questioned the image issues in the papers of Zhan Qimin, Cao Xuetao and others, is an internationally renowned academic anti-fraud website along with Retraction Watch and For Better Science. PubPeer was founded anonymously in 2012 by Brendan Stehr, Richard Smith and George Smith, neuroscientists working at the French National Center for Scientific Research. In order to raise funds, Brandon Steer and three others gave up their anonymity in 2015 and reorganized PubPeer into the non-profit PubPeer Foundation. Between 2016 and 2017, PubPeer accepted former hedge fund managers, Funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation co-founded by billionaire John Arnold and his wife Laura. The foundation also donated to the science integrity center, the parent company of the Retraction Watch website.

Brandon Steer, chairman of the PubPeer Foundation, said in an email to China News Weekly that the current board of directors of the PubPeer Foundation includes neuroscientist Boris Barber of the Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, senior scientist Writer Ivan Oransky and himself. Ivan Oransky is also the main writer of Retraction Watch.

Steer said that PubPeer is not replicating the pre-publication peer review and review of academic journals, but is a response to problems such as conflicts of interest, commercialism and erroneous biases that exist in the current pre-publication review system. They hope to use PubPeer to make up for the deficiencies of the former.

According to the site's rules, users can choose to comment under their real name or anonymously. Comments are moderated before appearing on the site, and the review process for anonymous comments and comments from "greylisted" accounts can take up to a week. The website will not review the scientific nature and authenticity of comments, but will reject comments that are obviously wrong, unclear, misleading or potentially malicious. At the same time, the website's rules prohibit comments based on hearsay, accusations of misconduct, or speculation about the motivations of individual authors and researchers. The website has also opened a reporting function for non-compliant comments, claiming that it reserves the right to delete or edit non-compliant comments. Operators will adjust comments when necessary to ensure they comply with the rules.

can be found through the above rules that factuality is the platform’s standard for comments. However, since the website itself does not conduct scientific and authenticity review, factual comments that meet PubPeer requirements may still be wrong or even misleading.

In response, Stehr explained that it is completely unrealistic to require PubPeer to conduct a scientific review. Conducting scientific review requires access to a lot of raw data, and PubPeer does not have the resources to solve the quality control problems that the global publishing industry cannot solve. If users think there is an error or misunderstanding in a comment, they can comment directly and point out the problem.

In PubPeer’s rules, words such as reducing legal risks appear many times. In fact, as early as 2014, PubPeer was sued by Fazlul Sarkar, who worked at the University of Mississippi in the United States. The reason was that the school terminated Sarkar's employment after seeing comments on the website. The American Civil Liberties Union, which sided with PubPeer, defended it on the basis of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sarkar's request to publish the identity of the anonymous reviewer was ultimately rejected by the court.

To avoid legal disputes, PubPeer adopts a nearly neutral way of presenting comments. In most cases, PubPeer does not modify or delete comment threads, even if the author provides a convincing reply or explanation, and makes the full history of the discussion publicly available, the site said. They believe that other readers may have similar questions as the doubters, so it is beneficial to publicly display the complete process of comments and comments. The core point of these rules is that PubPeer itself does not make subjective judgments.

Despite this, the system design that allows anonymous comments and lacks scientific and authenticity review still provides some people with the possibility to frame and slander scientific researchers.

Since May this year, people have posted anonymously on the PubPeer website, questioning the multiple uses and reuse of 24 papers signed by Dong Chen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of Tsinghua University School of Medicine. In response, Dong Chen replied to China News Weekly that he and 10 former doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows around the world reviewed 20 papers for which he was the corresponding author, and within a week, reviewed every article on the Pubpeer website. Questions raised were answered in detail. Dong Chen emphasized that their investigation and answers clearly showed that there was no fraud in these papers and there was no academic misconduct.

In a response to one of the papers being questioned, Dong Chen said, "We welcome constructive criticism aimed at improving the quality and rigor of science. However, these questions demonstrate generally accepted principles for the field, the topic, and the industry There is a lack of understanding, so most criticisms have no scientific value. As a loyal supporter of the PubPeer forum, we do not want PubPeer, a professional scientific communication platform, to be used by some anonymous doubters to distract scientists from their daily scientific research activities. It goes against the original intention of the platform."

In this regard, Lin Chenghua, deputy director of the China Academy of Science and Education Strategy at Zhejiang University, believes that third-party academic anti-counterfeiting platforms like PubPeer should establish an audit mechanism for anonymous comments. Platforms need to set up relevant standards and procedures to conduct scientific and authentic review of anonymous comments to avoid accidental injury or even false accusations caused by academic doubts. After procedural justice at the institutional level is improved, platforms should also establish a compensation mechanism for scientific researchers who have been accidentally injured or maliciously slandered by false comments to restore the reputation of those questioned. Only when the internal mechanism of the third-party platform itself is increasingly improved can its academic credibility and lasting vitality be maintained.

Compared to PubPeer, which is run by a foundation, For Better Science, hosted by German independent science journalist Leonid Schneider, is more personal. On June 15, the website published a report on suspected mass fabrication of papers in the field of mathematics in China. Onide Schneider said that the website rejects comments that are insulting, abusive, offensive or without evidence. While accepting anonymous comments, real-name comments are encouraged. All comment moderation is done by him.

Experimental images in the biomedical field have become the focus of the fight against counterfeiting.

Stehr told China News Weekly that most of the problems pointed out on PubPeer involve images in the author's paper. Dr. Elizabeth Bicker, who once worked in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, is currently investigating image abnormalities and possible academic misconduct in various papers. According to Bicker's query, 121 papers from multiple hospitals in China were suspected of falsified images.

Bi Ke said in an interview with China News Weekly that among the papers involved, there seemed to be no problem with the image of a single paper. But by combing through the images in all papers, she found that these papers used the same images: there were duplicate images between different papers; there were also duplications within some papers, such as two images representing different experiments that partially overlapped. From this, she believes that papers may come from "paper factories".

Previously, Bick had questioned the existence of image fraud in more than 400 papers from many tertiary hospitals in China, and pointed to "paper factories". She told China News Weekly that most papers with image duplication problems involve cancer biology, oncology and molecular biology, and spectral duplication occurs more in the nanometer field. Papers in these fields often contain many images and spectra, so problems are relatively easy to spot. Papers in other fields may only have bar graphs, line graphs, or heat maps, so it is not easy to attract attention.

Bicker pointed out that many of the authors of the papers she questioned had ties to hospitals in China. also. A large number of papers from Indian and American researchers also suffer from image fraud.

In Bicker’s view, she prefers to think of herself as a “data detective” rather than an academic anti-counterfeiter or supervisor. She hopes to "motivate" researchers who don't pay enough attention to academic integrity by publishing her work on her blog and Twitter.

Peer review and interest groups

Academic papers need to be peer reviewed before being published in journals. Therefore, peer review is also regarded as the "filter" of the paper. In this regard, Bicker said that peer review in academic journals is based on the assumption that the data in the paper is credible. There is no special training in peer review, and its purpose is not to detect fraud. The value of peer review lies in providing professional justification for the logic and experiments of the paper.

Discovery of misconduct or other academic integrity issues in a paper should be made after the journal accepts the manuscript and before it is sent for peer review. Beeke suggested that many journals already screen for plagiarism through plagiarism checks, and that reviewing images and other academic integrity issues should be added to the process.

Even after five years, more than 100 papers that Bicker once raised doubts with publishers and authors have not been corrected or retracted. Therefore, the next step is for her to publicly discuss these papers on social media and PubPeer. Bicker believes that until journals improve their pre-publication review, platforms such as PubPeer are the best methods currently available. She bluntly stated that academic journals and scientific research institutions often do not want to take action on issues in papers because of various conflicts of interest: journals and publishers do not want to correct or retract papers that can still be sold or included in their citation indexes; universities and Research institutions are also reluctant to condemn star scholars who can bring them large amounts of funding.

Bicker took as an example the paper on hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 published by Philippe Gautrey's team at the end of March this year. To increase a journal's impact factor, journal publishers may leave high-profile problematic papers in place rather than correct them or retract them, she noted. Another possibility is that the author of a certain paper is a famous scientist, or even one of the authors is a member of the journal's editorial board, so other editors are afraid to deal with problematic papers. Philippe Gautrey's team's research on hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 is a hot topic right now. However, the sample size of their paper was too small, and there may be issues including ethical approval, confounding factors, and loose PCR results. However, this paper was peer-reviewed and accepted within 24 hours of submission to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. One of the co-authors of the paper, Jean Marc Rolain, is the editor-in-chief of the submitted journal and has huge interests.

Elizabeth Beeke described the matter on her blog: "This is equivalent to allowing students to grade their own papers, and the result is A+."

The single evaluation mechanism leads to fraud and the prosperity of anti-counterfeiting

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Science History and Scientific Culture Research Professor Li Xia of the college believes that in addition to basic research where paper writing is the main work, in other applied research, papers should only be by-products that record the research process, opinions and solutions, and solutions to problems. But in the past few decades, the number of papers has become the number one indicator in China's science and technology evaluation standards. Especially in the medical field, a single evaluation system has caused obstacles to the professional title evaluation, job competition, and project application of the majority of medical staff.

Lin Chenghua, deputy director of the China Academy of Science and Education Strategy at Zhejiang University, pointed out that the current targets of academic anti-counterfeiting are mainly existing papers published in the past. In the past ten years or so, China has been in a period of "Great Leap Forward in Scientific Research" and the number of published papers has been booming. In the past stage, the country’s orientation towards scientific research also required more quantity, which resulted in many problems including academic fraud.

Li Xia believes that the existence of academic anti-counterfeiters such as Elizabeth Bicker has played a third-party supervision role for scientific researchers and journals. But at the same time, anonymous comments on platforms such as PubPeer can also become tools for fabrication, false accusations and malicious slander.

Li Xia emphasized that the identification of academic fraud requires specialized agencies to carry out identification. At present, major universities in China have academic committees at the department and school levels, which can arbitrate academic integrity issues for master's and doctoral students and ordinary teachers. However, it is difficult to arbitrate academic integrity issues such as Yangtze Scholars, academicians of the two academies, and those in high positions. university leaders to deal with it.These people control a large amount of academic and social resources and have a decisive influence on universities and the field. Therefore, even if they are questioned about academic fraud, most of them ignore it. In order to deal with the academic integrity issue of high-end academic talents, the country should go beyond the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology to establish a national-level supreme academic arbitration committee. If the academic status of the person involved is too high, top international scholars may be considered to serve as special committee members for authoritative identification. If the country can send a clear signal to the fraud of high-end academic talents, it will have a huge deterrent effect on academic fraud.