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.

Comments are moderated. Those that are in scope and from an identified person will be published after a delay. 

Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. It promotes science in many ways: administering grants, advising government, holding meetings and lectures, and publishing expert reports on scientific matters of public importance.  

There are currently around 1,800 Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, all elected through a stringent and highly competitive process which includes nomination by two Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS), detailed scrutiny of the candidate's achievements and publications, reports by referees, and consideration by a committee of experts in their broad area of research.  Although most Fellows are elected on the basis of their scientific contributions, others are nominated on the basis of "wider contributions to science, engineering or medicine through leadership, organisation, scholarship or communication".

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years. It seems that election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, like loss of virginity, is something that can't readily be reversed.

This brings us, then, to the case of Elon Musk, who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 on the basis of his technological achievements, notably in space travel and electrical vehicle development. Unfortunately, since that time, his interests have extended to using social media for political propaganda, while at the same time battling what he sees as "woke mind virus" and attacks on free speech. Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion on issues such as climate change and medicine, over the past year or two, he's started promoting alternative ideas.   

In summer of 2024, a number of FRSs became concerned at how Musk was using his social media platform (previously Twitter, now termed X) to stir up racial unrest and anti-government sentiment in the UK. Notable tweets by him from this period included incendiary comments and frank misinformation, as documented in this Guardian article. 

This led to a number of Fellows expressing dismay that Musk had been elected. There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was "a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society". The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK. 

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk's behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. That's just how lawyers work. They're paid to rescue people from ethical impulses that may get them into trouble. And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn't breached the Code of Conduct. If you want to see if you agree, you can find the Code of Conduct here.

Many of the signatories of the letter, including me, were unhappy with this response. We set about assembling further evidence of behaviours incompatible with the Code of Conduct. There is a lot of material, which can be broadly divided into two categories, depending on whether it relates to "Scientific conduct" or "Principles".  

On Scientific conduct, the most relevant points from the Code of Conduct are:

2.6. Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society's statement on research integrity and to the highest standards. 

2.10. Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public. 

2.11. Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Most of those I've spoken to agree that a serious breach of these principles was in 2022, when Musk tweeted: "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci", thereby managing to simultaneously offend the LGBTQ community, express an antivaxx sentiment, and put Fauci, already under attack from antivaxxers, at further risk. Fauci was not a Fellow at the time these comments were made, but that should not matter given the scope of the statement is "individuals in the scientific community". This incident was covered by CBS News.

Now that the US election is over, Musk seems emboldened to ramp up his attacks. On 19th November 2024, he retweeted this to his millions of followers, followed by a compilation of attacks on Fauci on 21st November,

Neuralink

There are also questions about the management of Musk's research project, Neuralink, which involves developing a brain-computer interface to help people who are paralysed. While this is clearly a worthy goal, his approach to conducting research is characterised by refusal to let anyone interfere with how he does things. This has led to accusations of failure to adhere to regulatory procedures for Good Laboratory Practice. For instance, consider these quotes from this article: 

'I think what concerns people is that Neuralink could be cutting corners, and so far nobody has stopped them,' says Nick Ramsey, a clinical neuroscientist at University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.  There’s an incredible push by Neuralink to bypass the conventional research world, and there’s little interaction with academics, as if they think that we’re on the wrong track—that we’re inching forward while they want to leap years forward.

In response to Musk's claim that no monkey had died because of Neuralink, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wrote to the SEC, claiming Musk’s comments were false. The group said it had obtained veterinary records from Neuralink’s experiments showing that at least 12 young, healthy monkeys were euthanized as a result of problems with Neuralink’s implant. The group alleged that Musk’s comments are misleading investors, and urged SEC regulators to investigate Musk and Neuralink for securities fraud.

The problems with Neuralink do not stop with the ethics of the animals and the secrecy surrounding them. In a piece in Nature, various scientists were interviewed about the first human trial that was conducted earlier this year. The main concern was lack of transparency. Human trials are usually recorded in clinical.trials.gov, which was set up precisely to make it easier to track if studies had followed a protocol. Musk did not do this. His approach to the human trials again reflects his distaste for any regulations. But the regulations are there for a purpose, and one would expect a Fellow of the Royal Society to abide by them; otherwise we end up with scandals such as Theranos or the stem cell experiments by Macchiarini and Birchall. The ethics of this kind of trial also needs careful handling, especially in terms of the patient's understanding of possible adverse effects, their expectations of benefits, and the undertaking of researchers to provide long-term support for the prosthesis.

If we turn to the more general issues that come under Principles, then the Code of Conduct states: 

Fellows and Foreign Members shall not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the Society's mission or bring the Society into disrepute.

 Here are some examples that I would regard as contrary to the Society's mission.

Promoting vaccine hesitation

The Royal Society has done good work promoting public understanding of vaccines, as with this blogpost by Charles Bangham FRS. In contrast, as described here, Musk has promoted vaccine conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine views on his platform. This Tweet had 85 million views:

Downplaying the climate emergency

In 2023 Musk played down the seriousness of climate change, and 2024 participated in a bizarre interview with Donald Trump, which dismayed climate experts. Among the commenters was Michael Mann, who said “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.” Mann was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2024.

Spreading deep fakes and misinformation on X

As recently as 2022, the Royal Society published a report in which Frank Kelly (FRS) noted the high priority that the Royal Society gives to accurate scientific communication:

The Royal Society’s mission since it was established in 1660 has been to promote science for the benefit of humanity, and a major strand of that is to communicate accurately. But false information is interfering with that goal. It is accused of fuelling mistrust in vaccines, confusing discussions about tackling the climate crisis and influencing the debate about genetically modified crops. 

Earlier this month, Martin McKee wrote in the British Medical Journal:

 Musk’s reason for buying Twitter was to influence the social discourse. And influence he did—by using his enormous platform (203 million followers) to endorse Trump, spread disinformation about voter fraud and deep fakes of Kamala Harris, and amplify conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to race replacement theory to misogyny.

The most recent development is the announcement that Musk is to be co-director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, an allusion to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin) in the Trump Administration, with a brief to cut waste and bureaucracy. The future for US science is starting to look bleak, with Musk being given unfettered powers to cut budgets to NIH and NASA, among others.  This tweet, which he endorsed, indicates that rather than using objective evidence, the cuts will fall on those who have criticized Trump, who will find bowdlerized summaries of their work used to generate public outrage. The tweet reads:  "Here’s what the U.S. Government wasted $900 Billion of your tax dollars on in 2023. The Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) will fix this. America deserves leaders that prioritize sensible spending" before presenting a chart listing items for cuts, with unsourced descriptions of expenditure, including:

• Dr Fauci's monkey business on NIH's "monkey island":   $33,200,000 
• NIH's meth-head monkeys:  portion of $12,000,000 
• Dr Fauci's transgender monkey study: $477,121

I'm sad to say I agree with Alex Wild, Curator of Entomology at University of Texas Austin, who wrote a few days ago: "I hope federally funded scientists are preparing for large scale, bad faith attacks by Musk and his troll army.  It’s pretty clear the DOGE operation is going to take snippets of grant proposals and papers, present them out of context, and direct weaponized harassment of individual people."

What next?  

I've been told that in the light of the evolving situation, the Royal Society Council will look again at the case of Elon Musk. In conversations I have had with them, they emphasise that they must adhere to their own procedures, which are specified in the Statutes, and which involve a whole series of stages of legal scrutiny, committee evaluation, discussion with the Fellow in question, and ultimately a vote from the Fellowship, before a Fellow or Foreign Member could be expelled. While I agree that if you have a set of rules you should stick to them, I find the fact that nobody has been expelled for over 150 years telling. It does suggest that the Statutes are worded so that it is virtually impossible to do anything about Fellows who breach the Code of Conduct. In effect the Statutes serve a purpose of protecting the Royal Society from ever having to take action against one of its Fellows.

In the course of investigating this blogpost, I've become intimately familiar with the Code of Conduct, which requires me to "treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including ... foreign Members". I'm not willing to treat Elon Musk "collegially and with courtesy". Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him. Accordingly, last week I resigned my FRS. I don't do this in the expectation of having any impact: in the context of over 350 years of Royal Society history, this is just a blip. I just feel far more comfortable to be dissociated from an institution that continues to honour this disreputable man.

Note: Comments will be accepted if they are by a named individual, civil, and on topic. They are moderated and there may be a delay before they appear online. 

 

PS. 1st Dec 2024. It seems many people did not read this far and I have deleted a lot of anonymous comments.  I will close this post to comments now, as I think nobody has anything new to say and I don't think anything will be gained by more to and fro.  Thanks for all the support - which outnumbers criticism by about 20:1.