Seven reasons for keeping Elon Musk as a Fellow of the Royal Society

 

Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In brief, over the summer a group of 74 FRSs asked the RS Council to consider revoking Musk's FRS on the grounds that he had attempted to interfere with British politics by spreading disinformation with the aim of stirring up unrest. The Council took advice, considered carefully and concluded that nothing should be done. I discussed this decision with senior figures in the RS and presented them with additional evidence of Musk's unsuitability for the honour of FRS. I was told that they could take another look, but they had to abide by the procedures laid out in the Statutes, and this could take some time. Last week I heard that the Council had met again to discuss this issue and come to the same conclusion: nothing should be done.  

It's hard to evaluate their reasoning, as no details have been given. Colleagues of mine who remain as FRSs occasionally report snippets of information they have heard from members of Council, but these have been inconsistent and unreliable. But meanwhile, I've had many members of the public contact me about this issue. The majority are strongly supportive of my position; even those who were on the fence leapt off it after the infamous "Roman" salute. Musk's involvement in the dissolution of US academic institutions, achieved by suppressing some of their activities and starving them of funds, has further solidified opinion against him. But few FRSs have spoken out. Such information that I've gleaned has come from informal contacts, where I've heard seven different arguments against the expulsion of Elon Musk.  Given that I've previously laid out a set of reasons in favour of Musk's expulsion,  in the interests of balance,  I present here the counter arguments.  

1. Musk should not have his FRS withdrawn because he does important and innovative scientific research, and is a role model for scientists worldwide. 

In fact, I include this one for completeness, but I've not encountered a single person who has made this case.  It seems generally accepted that he is the antithesis of the scholarly ideal set out by Jacob Bronowski (2008: Science and Human Values) - if you turn all the negative statements to positives, and positives to negatives, this is a fair description of Musk: 

... they do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are particularly the virtues of science.  

Instead, I've seen a weary procession of arguments that all begin with someone saying "Of course, Musk is terrible but we shouldn't expel him because...."  

2. The Royal Society can't be political.  

This argument has some merit. On the one hand, the Royal Society is a registered charity, and on the other hand it offers science policy advice to government. As this blogpost from the Charity Commission makes clear: 

 Charities are required to be independent and cannot have political purposes, and this is important for public trust in charities. As such, charities must never stray into party politics – they must never promote, or be seen to promote, a political party or candidate. As trustees and charity leaders you must protect your charity’s reputation and not allow your organisation to be used as a vehicle for the expression of the party-political views of any individual trustee, employee, political party, or candidate.

There are two reasons why I think the expulsion of Musk is entirely compatible with the Charity Commission rules.  

First, there are plenty of reasons to object to Musk's FRS that have nothing to do with politics. He has repeatedly used his social media platform to attack Anthony Fauci, a respected scientist and Foreign Member of the Royal Society. This is not usual academic discourse: it is calling for Fauci to be prosecuted, and blaming him for medical crimes. Fauci needs personal security protection because there is credible threat to his life, stirred up by various factions who disapproved of his role in the Covid-19 pandemic - including Musk, who loathed having restrictions on movement imposed and is now arguing that Fauci's research somehow caused the pandemic. It is easy to find examples of Musk's attacks on Fauci by Googling for "Musk Fauci" - e.g. this piece in the New York Post. 

Other reasons are provided in my blogpost: lack of appropriate regulatory approval for Neuralink, and spreading of disinformation about climate science and vaccinations. 

Second, the fact that Musk also does overtly political things shouldn't make people timid about disapproving of his other actions. And most of Musk's political activities are part and parcel of his disinformation campaigns, and can be objected to on the grounds that they are dishonest. 

In sum, if the Royal Society were to campaign against the Reform Party, that would be improper. But to dissociate themselves from the spreading of disinformation seems to me to be a valid and desirable activity, compatible with their charitable status, and their stated aims: 

The Society ... is a registered charity, undertaking a range of activities that provide public benefit either directly or indirectly. As a national academy, it represents the UK and collaborates with international partners to advocate for science and its benefits.  

3. The Royal Society has other odious people as Fellows. 

I was amused to see this argument trotted out in a couple of pieces in the media - first in the Spectator by Toby Young (someone whose own ennoblement has raised eyebrows), and then by Jawad Iqbal in the Times. Both pieces noted that James Watson remained an FRS despite his abhorrent views on eugenics. Iqbal also noted that Prince Andrew had been made a Royal Fellow in 2013. This was perhaps an unwise example to use, given that Prince Andrew's name quietly disappeared from the list of Fellows in 2022, after he was encouraged to resign from a number of honours.

I haven't heard this case made by many FRSs, and maybe that's because they can see what a grubby argument it is. But there is more appetite for a related point:  

4. Expelling Musk could set a dangerous precedent.

As it happens, some people who contacted me after my resignation have taken the opportunity to tell me about other dodgy FRSs - not because they adopt argument 3, but on the contrary, because they think that if the Royal Society were to start taking its Code of Conduct seriously, there are others who should also be looked at. One can see that this line of argument might generate a degree of nervousness among Council members.  

5. Musk's supporters might say bad things about the Royal Society if he were expelled.  

There's three versions of this: (a) they'd say the RS was political (see point 2); (b) they'd say the RS was 'woke', and (c) they'd say RS was 'elitist'.  

These arguments remind me all too sadly of the decline in the state of debate in British politics. It seems to be accepted as a defensible line of argument these days to warn against doing something that you know to be right because someone else might, either mischievously or sincerely, misattribute your motives for doing so. The solution is to state clearly what your reasons are, and not get derailed by name-calling. If the Royal Society is really worried about reputational damage, then they should realise that being designated as 'woke' or 'elitist' by your opponents is far less of an insult than being described as cowardly by your friends.  

6. There could be bad consequences for science and scientists if Musk were expelled. 

This argument sounds suspiciously like a case for appeasement of a bully. History has taught us that appeasement does not end well. Indeed, even in the past weeks, we've seen various academic organisations and institutions scrabbling to obey directives from the Trump regime to remove all mention of diversity, equality and inclusion from their documents and websites: it has not saved them from the depredations of DOGE. Philip Ball has written in Chemistry World about the tendency for institutions to show "anticipatory obedience" and the importance of resistance.  

A more specific version of this argument maintains that it could make matters worse for Anthony Fauci if the Royal Society were to expel Musk, particularly if his attacks on Fauci were cited as a reason. Sadly enough, it seems to me we have here what scientists call a floor effect - i.e. the situation for Fauci is so bad - with serious threats on his life and his personal security protection now removed - that it's not clear it could get any worse. Showing him some solidarity may not achieve much, but it would confirm that the Royal Society is prepared to stand up to bullies and support those who do deserve the accolade of being honoured.  

7. There could be bad consequences for the Royal Society if Musk were expelled.  

The main bad consequence that goes beyond name-calling (see 5) would be if Musk decided to mount a legal challenge to his expulsion. No doubt the legal counsel that the Royal Society has employed will have judged how likely this is to happen, and how likely it could be successful if it did happen. Nobody wants to get embroiled in legal battles, which can be expensive and arduous. My personal view is that the Royal Society would have a stronger defence against legal action if it polled the whole Fellowship and the result turned out in favour of expelling Musk. I suggested that the Fellowship should be consulted last Summer but was told that was not in line with the Statutes. (I should add that I'm not confident that the Fellowship would vote to expel Musk - many of them seem swayed by arguments 2-6, but with every day that passes, his malign influence on science and society increases, and so I think it's possible he might be voted out).  

Personally, I think the Royal Society should take the risk of a legal challenge. They are a wealthy organisation, and they represent the voice of scientists in the UK. Our fellow scientists in the USA are now under a level of pressure that even the most pessimistic of us had not anticipated. It is hard for individual scientists to resist. But the Royal Society has the clout and the resource to weather the storm. If they would take a stand, this would show solidarity with our friends across the pond, by confirming that the Brits aren't going to honour someone who is playing a major role in dismantling scientific research in the USA.

Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine: another embarrassing paper for MDPI

 

Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense. In a recent Open Letter, a group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature.

After the Open Letter was published, the paper that instigated our concern was promptly retracted by the journal, but as far as I can tell, not much else has changed. The point about a paper like this is that it is so blatantly bad that it cannot have been through any kind of serious editorial scrutiny or peer review. It acts as a canary in the coalmine: if gobbledegook is published in your journal, it's an indicator that you need to look very carefully at your editorial processes, and act immediately to remove editors who let this stuff in. Sadly, I haven't yet seen much evidence of that happening at Scientific Reports.

This post, however, concerns another publisher, MDPI, who have regularly featured on my blog, and not in a good way. Last month, I commented on the strange state of affairs whereby Finland had downgraded its classification of 187 MDPI journals because of evidence of "minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment", at the same time that German universities had secured a national publishing agreement with MDPI. The story I have to tell here may confirm Finland's judgement, and give Germany pause for thought. It concerns this article: Abbas, R., Amran, G. A., Hussain, I., & Ma, S. (2022). A Soft Computing View for the Scientific Categorization of Vegetable Supply Chain Issues. Logistics, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics6030039 

As with the Springer Nature example, the first indication of problems came via the Problematic Paper Screener, the excellent system that checks articles for various red flags, including "tortured phrases". These provide an indicator that a paper has probably been plagiarised but then passed through a process that substitutes synonyms for main words, with the aim of evading plagiarism detection software. So, as noted on PubPeer, in this case we have "fluffy logic" for fuzzy logic, and "unaided ML" for unsupervised machine learning. 

However, example sentences in which tortured phrases were embedded indicated a deeper problem. Most of the text is incomprehensible, and things start to get seriously weird when the authors get on to tomatoes. We are told: 

.... the third creation framework considered for the creation phase is tomatoes. This creation framework is devoted to developing homegrown creatures brought up in rural settings to create vegetables. This can bring domesticated tomatoes likewise to broad or serious frameworks. Broad frameworks include creatures wandering meadows (ordinarily under the oversight of a herder). Differently, serious tomatoes are situated in shut foundations and are outfitted with ICT innovation, which empowers creatures to be observed continuously. Inside these creation frameworks, the most run-of-the-mill issues we run over are meadow observing [75], creature government assistance [76], creature conduct following [77], and tomato creation forecast and enhancement [78,79], as displayed in Figure 3. 

According to a VSC point of view, the formal meanings of these issues are recorded beneath. 

• Field checking: This issue is connected with the exact recognizable proof of meadow inventories to separate between the most reasonable sorts for tomatoes purposes. 

• Tomato government assistance: This is centered around the example arrangement of the dehydration way of behaving in brushing creatures for investigations of creature nourishment, development, and well-being. 

• Tomato growth checking: This depends on the utilization of conduct investigations to recognize early indications of medical problems and advance early negotiation. 

A clue to the origin of this material comes from the cited references, which are about pigs and cattle. Anonymous PubPeer commenter Nerita vitiensis found that a substantial part of the text was adapted from a previous work by different authors, but with the topics of "livestock and fish" changed to "tomatoes and cruciferous vegetables". This explains the description of tomatoes as "creatures" under the oversight of a herder. 

The authors of this piece seem seriously out of their depth, as evidenced by the bland comments apparently written by Chat GPT that they provided on PubPeer. 

Now, one very good thing about MDPI is that it generally identifies the academic editor who handled a paper, and it sometimes also makes public the reviewer reports. This should mean that when a major foul-up like this occurs, it should be possible to identify and purge those responsible for accepting the work. 

The academic editors who accepted this article are Xue-Ming Yuan, who is currently soliciting papers for a special issue in the MDPI journal Mathematics, and Anrong Xue.

The MDPI website shows reports from three named reviewers. 

The first reviewer, Edyta Kardas, was concerned about the use of first-person language, and punctuation, but not apparently about statements about animated tomatoes. She reviewed 8 papers for MDPI journals in 2024.

The second reviewer, Alejandro Vega-Muñoz focused solely on the structure of the article, but apparently did not look at the content. He has edited two special issues for other MDPI journals. 

 The third reviewer, Francesco Barreca, attempted a synopsis of the article (which I could not understand) and then had just two suggestions:

"The work is well done but I have some remarks:

• The figures should be review, the dimension are variable

 • Moderate English changes are required"

The "moderate English changes" were unspecified. Barreca has a track record of editing a special issue of another MDPI journal.

 
Last week, I contacted Publication Ethics at MDPI to draw their attention to this article, noting the dereliction of duty by reviewers and editors, and suggesting that as well as retracting the paper, they should remove the editors and peer reviewers from their database. They replied to say: 

"We confirm that the Editorial Office is investigating the concerns related to this paper following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics https://publicationethics.org/ of which we are a member and our policy https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark29.

We would like to inform you that this case is a priority for us, and we are actively working to resolve it. We will update you on the outcome of this investigation as soon as possible."

I await developments with interest. It is widely recognised that COPE guidelines are not well-suited for dealing with this kind of situation: they make the default assumption that authors should be consulted to give their perspective when criticisms are raised - a reasonable assumption in many cases, but not when there is such blatant evidence of fakery.

The most serious case of infestation of a publisher by nonsense occurred in 2022-3, when the publisher Hindawi (owned by Wiley) was targeted by paper mills who, among other things, generated numerous papers that I labelled as AI gobbledegook sandwiches. Eventually, the publisher withdrew literally thousands of papers and closed the Hindawi brand, after complaints by shareholders started impacting profits.

Like many of the sleuths who track down paper mills, I have become cynical about the commitment to research integrity that is claimed by many publishers, including MDPI. But I do believe they will act when it is in their interests to do so. As the amount of nonsense and disinformation in the scientific literature increases, I think we'll enter a new phase where trustworthiness of journal contents will start to have much higher value. If you want to be taken seriously as a peer-reviewed journal, you just cannot continue to pump out articles accompanied by superficial verbiage from "peer reviewers" that makes no real contact with the subject matter. Publishers will need to act now to clean up their editorial boards if they want to stay in business.   

Update 7th February 2025

 

I am pleased to report that I have now heard from MDPI as follows:

Following a thorough investigation of this paper and according to the recommendations of the journal's Editorial Board, we have decided to retract this publication, in line with MDPI’s retraction policy: https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark30

Further details regarding this retraction can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6290/9/1/20

However, as far as I can tell, no action has been taken against the editors and reviewers who were responsible for accepting the article.  The only thing I notice is that the peer reviewer comments are no longer linked to the main page for the article on the journal website (though they are still available here).  I have written to MDPI Publication Ethics to ask for clarification as to whether any action will be taken to replace the editors, and to remove the peer reviewers from their register.  Unless a robust approach is taken to removing those who admit such nonsense into the journal, readers and potential authors can have no confidence in the integrity of MDPI's editorial processes.

Update 12th February 2025

I have now received a response from MDPI Publication Ethics to my query about editors and peer reviewers.  The plan is to educate them rather than remove them.  

We are happy to provide additional details regarding our approach to this situation. 

In line with the recommendations from COPE for ethical and transparent scholarly publishing (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/guideline/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing), we are adopting an educational approach. 
This implies sending notifications to the reviewers and the editor to inform them of this retraction, clarify their responsibilities in the review process, and outline the potential consequences of a superficial review, according to our guidelines for reviewers (https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers#_bookmark11) and information for editors (https://www.mdpi.com/editors). 

Given the significant responsibility that comes with the role of peer reviewers, which directly impacts the credibility of both the journal and the broader scientific literature, we take proactive steps to offer additional guidance and resources beyond our standard guidelines. An example of this initiative can be found on our MDPI Blog: https://blog.mdpi.com/2025/01/22/reviewer-responsibilities/

Moving forward, we will closely monitor the activities of both the editor and reviewers to ensure adherence to the highest standards of academic publishing.

We remain at your disposal for any further information.

Papermillers must be feeling very cheerful right now.

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Retrospective look at blog highlights of 2024: What happened next?

It's always interesting for a blogger to look back to see which posts have garnered most attention. In 2024 there were three standout items, my resignation from the Royal Society, an Open Letter about editorial failings at the journal Scientific Reports, and a guest post by René Aquarius about his experiences as a reviewer for MDPI. For each of these blogposts, it's interesting to consider not just the number of hits, but also the broader impact. Blogging is a great way to let off steam, but does it actually achieve anything?

Resignation from the Royal Society 

As I said at the time of writing the post, I don't expect my resignation to change much at the Royal Society, but I was surprised at the amount of interest in the matter. The story was picked up by national media (e.g. here and here), and even got covered in France and the Netherlands. I had anticipated I might be attacked by a swarm of trolls, but there was no more than a handful of rude emails, saying the Royal Society was better off without me. What was more remarkable was the outpouring of positive reactions. My inbox was swamped with people thanking me for taking this step - not just academics, but people from all walks of life. It's customary when elected to the Royal Society for colleagues to send congratulatory emails: the number of congratulations I received for resigning was about five times as many as I had for being elected. I felt I had struck a chord with many people who were fed up with unsuitable individuals being honoured. British people in particular were outraged that the Royal Society was honouring someone who was spreading misinformation with the apparent aim of undermining our democracy.

I've seen only one serious attempt to challenge the arguments in my blogpost - by Toby Young in the Spectator. I can imagine that the comms team at the Royal Society may not have been overjoyed at his main line of argument, which was to say that there had been many Fellows of the Royal Society with rebarbative opinions who hadn't been thrown out, so why should they start now? He described me as a left-wing Torquemada, which I rather enjoyed, except that his implication was that my objections to Musk were political. Had he read my blogpost, he'd see that politics didn't come into it - it is the lack of scientific integrity that is the issue.

As a delightful twist to the story, Toby Young, who is notorious for his foul-mouthed comments on women and disabled people, has just been appointed to the House of Lords, showing that the Royal Society is not alone among the British establishment in honouring those who represent the antithesis of their core values. I can only assume that Kemi Badenoch, who was responsible for his elevation, did it to own the libs.

Open letter regarding Scientific Reports

This letter, cosigned by 22 scientific sleuths, noted that laughably awful papers were getting published in the Springer Nature journal Scientific Reports, which is generally regarded as a serious journal. It looked to us as if the journal was being infiltrated by paper mills who were using it as an outlet for fraudulent or low quality work. For this to happen, there need to be editors who are either turning a blind eye to such articles, or were actively working with a paper mill to accommodate them. A quick analysis of the editors listed on the journal website turned up 28 who had records on PubPeer indicative of involvement in research misconduct.

So what has happened since? We received a reply from Chris Graf, the Research Integrity Director at Springer Nature, thanking us for our letter and emphasising the extent to which the publisher was putting resources into tackling research fraud and paper mills. The article that had sparked off the Open Letter was retracted fairly promptly.

But when I rechecked the Editorial Board list today, 26 the 28 editors we'd listed were still in position - even though we'd given links to PubPeer entries that specified problematic behaviours of all of them. The two who are no longer listed are Ilyas Khan, and Achyut Shankar. I have no idea whether their disappearance from editorial roles at Scientific Reports has anything to do with the Open Letter. (Rule 1 of sleuthing: don't expect anyone in power to tell you if they have acted on information you provided).

And a final wrinkle to the story: a fellow sleuth told me about another editor linked to paper mills, Masoud Afrand, who had not been included in our list. He had actually been removed from the list of editors in March 2022, but then reappeared at some point in the summer of 2024 (as verified by the Wayback Machine). The Editor-in-Chief, Rafal Marszalek, explained this as a "clerical error". In email correspondence I pointed out to him that this was a pretty odd kind of clerical error, and that it did nothing to assuage growing concerns that there may be someone at a senior level at Scientific Reports who was actively working with paper millers.  I did not get a reply.

My experience as a reviewer for MDPI: guest post by René Aquarius

In this post, René describes the fate of a paper that he agreed to review for the Journal of Clinical Medicine, published by MDPI. The paper had numerous methodological flaws, including lack of a control group and discrepancies between the registered protocol and the final study, and René recommended rejection. What then followed was a bizarre series of exchanges with MDPI editors, who encouraged resubmission by the authors, then attempted to block René from re-reviewing the paper, after he'd agreed to do so. Eventually the paper was transferred to  another MDPI journal, Geriatrics, where he was again asked to review it. When he pointed out that the paper was largely unchanged from the original submission, it was withdrawn - but he then found it published a few weeks later in yet another MDPI journal.

This blogpost attracted a lot of comments, not least from people who had had similar experiences with MDPI. I have to say that these experiences, coupled with other evidence such as this and this make me very dubious about standards of peer review at MDPI. The impression is that hard-pressed editorial staff are expected to ensure peer review of submissions is achieved in 2-3 weeks, and they accordingly come to rely on anyone who will do a speedy job, without regard for quality. Indeed, high-quality reviews that raise difficult issues are problematic for them, because they will slow up the process. Accordingly these are sidelined or quietly forgotten about, in favour of minimalist 'reviews' such as those you can see here in reviews 1, 3 and 4.

Will anything change? Hopefully, René's post has helped raise awareness of the problematic aspects of peer review at MDPI journals. I doubt the publisher will do anything to change their peer review model unless the reputational damage from such revelations starts to hit their bottom line. Interestingly, in my last post of 2024, I noted that just before the Christmas break, Finland's Publication Forum (JUFO) downgraded the status of 187 MDPI journals in their index, a move that will disincentivize Finnish researchers from publishing there. However, a day later, MDPI announced that it had secured a national publishing agreement with ZB Med, which offered substantial discounts to authors from over 100 German Universities.

Epilogue

In each of these cases, we can see that a blogpost has raised the profile of an issue that is of relevance to academic scientists. Concrete impacts are harder to demonstrate - where changes happen, it's not clear if they are related to the blogpost, or just coincidental. And for most topics, it's a case of two steps forward and one step back, at best. But if I've learned one thing from my many years writing about such things, it's that you can't trust the people in positions of power to actually do the right thing unless they are prodded repeatedly and publicly (and sometimes not even then). So I hope to continue blogging through 2025, even though it may at times seem futile.

Happy New Year, and Illegitimi non carborundum.

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