Just as an aside, I looked on the website of a learned society well away from birds a few days ago, they have been publishing books and papers for about 150+ years that are issued to members and some offered for sale.Their publisher has changed from time to time and is currently Routledge who have recently been taken over by Taylor and Francis. The website made no secret that they were experiencing some problems with their book stock since takeover.........Perhaps the problem is wider.
Publisher Taylor & Francis is a member of OASP, the 'Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association'.
It is stated at
http://oaspa.org/membership/membership-applications/ : "
We look to the broader community to help us maintain and improve standards. Serious concerns about potential misconduct by one of our members can be submitted to the OASPA board according to the following procedure."
A formal complaint to OASPA against member Taylor & Francis was filed on 3 March 2017. "Dear OASPA, I am hereby filing a formal complaint to OASPA against one of your members, the publisher Taylor & Francis (TF), for the very persistent refusal of TF to retract two papers (Al-Sheikhly
et al. 2013, 2015). Both papers contain fabricated and/or falsified data (see attachments). [.....] Please sent me a response in which the receipt of this e-mail is acknowledged and please contact me immediately in case there are errors and/or mistakes in my texts. We are looking forward to start with working together with OASPA to ensure that both fraudulent papers (Al-Sheikhly
et al. 2013, 2015) in a journal of one of your members will be retracted ASAP. (...).".
A response from OASPA was received the same day. "From: Claire Redhead; To: Klaas van Dijk; Sent: Friday, March 03, 2017 5:08 PM; Subject: Re: Formal complaint to OASPA against member Taylor and Francis. Dear Klaas van Dijk, Thank you for your email. This is a lot of information to digest and will take me some time to go through. I will be in touch with you again by the end of next week. Sincerely, Claire -- Claire Redhead, Executive Director, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA".
A second response from OASPA was received the next week. "From: Claire Redhead; To: Klaas van Dijk; Sent: Friday, March 10, 2017 3:33 PM; Subject: Re: Formal complaint to OASPA against member Taylor and Francis. Dear Klaas van Dijk, I have now been through the information you sent through to me, however I am unable to open the attachments that contained emails. Please could you be kind enough to save the text as a pdf and send back to me? In accordance with our Member Investigation Procedure (
http://oaspa.org/membership/membership-applications/ ) I have informed OASPA's Membership Committee of your complaint. Please note that beyond my initial notification to Membership Committee that you have contacted OASPA and that you have raised a complaint against Taylor and Francis, as their employee Caroline Sutton will not be party to any discussions regarding this matter. As such I did not include Caroline Sutton when I shared the full details of the complaint and the supporting documentation with the Committee. The next step is for the remaining Committee Members to review the information sent by you. When I receive the email text from you I will pass that on to them also. I will endeavour to keep this process as timely as possible and will be in touch with you again when I have more news. Sincerely, Claire"
The remaining 5 Committee Members are listed at
http://oaspa.org/about/oaspas-committees/ They are:
* Xenia van Edig (Copernicus Publications) Chair.
* Catriona MacCallum (PLOS,
https://www.plos.org/ ).
* Mark Patterson (eLife,
https://elifesciences.org/ ).
* Eelco Ferwerda (OAPEN Foundation).
* Claire Redhead (OASPA).
I have sent the next day an e-mail with 17 attachments (all of them a PDF) to OASPA. "From: Klaas van Dijk; To: Claire Redhead; Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2017 2:14 PM; Dear Claire, Thanks alot for your quick acknowledgment that OASPA had received my formal complaint against publisher Taylor & Francis in good order and thanks for your follow-up of yesterday. I also would like to thank you very much for the decision to inform the members of the OASPA's Membership Committee about my complaint. Please accept my apologies that I had sent you attachments in my initial e-mail in the form of e-mails (with attachments). It is no problem at all to make a PDF of these emails. Note that there is a vast amount of documentation. I have therefore decided to forward to OASPA only some of the more relevant documents. I have numbered all 17 attachments (#01 to #17) and I have arranged them in a chronological order (excluding #1, a PDF of my formal complaint to OASPA, dated 3 March 2017). Attachment #16 will soon be published in the next issue of the journal Sandgrouse (
http://www.osme.org/sandgrouse ). [.....] Please don't hesitate to contact me when you would like to get more background information. I reiterate that I am always willing to communicate with anyone about any part of the contents of this e-mail and/or about any part of the attachments. Please sent me a response in which the receipt of this e-mail is acknowledged and please contact me immediately in case there are errors and/or mistakes in my texts. Yours sincerely, Klaas van Dijk"
I received an acknowledgement on 13 March 2017. "From: Claire Redhead; To: Klaas van Dijk; Sent: Monday, March 13, 2017 11:33 AM; Dear Klaas, Thank you for the additional files and information which I can confirm as received by me. I will pass these on to the Membership Committee, excluding Caroline Sutton. I will provide you with an update in due course. Sincerely, Claire"
So Claire Redhead told in this e-mail of 13 March 2017 to pass all attachments, and thus also attachment #07 (The 'Final investigation on serious allegations of fabricated and/or falsified data in Al-Sheikhly et al. (2013, 2015) - 1 July 2016') to Xenia van Edig of Copernicus Publications, to Catriona MacCallum of PLOS et al, to Mark Patterson of eLife and to Eelco Ferwerda of OAPEN Foundation.
I received on 5 April 2017 another e-mail from OASPA. "From: Claire Redhead; To: Klaas van Dijk; Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2017 11:44 AM; Dear Klaas, We have now concluded our review of your complaint and the supporting documentation that you supplied. The decision to retract the paper lies with the publisher. Regards, Claire"
So Xenia van Edig of Copernicus Publications, Catriona MacCallum of PLOS et al, Mark Patterson of eLife, Eelco Ferwerda of OAPEN Foundation and Claire Redhead of OASPA do not rebut the main conclusion of the 'Final investigation on serious allegations of fabricated and/or falsified data in Al-Sheikhly
et al. (2013, 2015) - 1 July 2016' that the paper on the breeding biology of the Basra Reed Warber contains fabricated and/or falsified data.
I have therefore sent the next day an e-mail about this conclusion to Claire Redhead. "From: Klaas van Dijk To: Claire Redhead; Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2017 1:12 PM; Dear Claire, Thanks alot for your e-mail of today, 5 April 2017, in which you inform me about the outcome of the review of my complaint which I had filed on 3 March 2017 to OASPA against member Taylor & Francis. I would like to tell you that I am very glad to read that "at least two members of the OASPA Board of Directors" have been unable to locate even a single mistake and/or error in my texts (which of course includes all 17 attachments). I also would like to tell you that I am also very glad that "at least two members of the OASPA Board of Directors" do not rebut that Al-Sheikhly et al. (2013), a paper in a Taylor & Francis journal, contains fabricated and/or falsified data. I have therefore concluded that "at least two members of the OASPA Board of Directors" agree with a large amount of conservationalists and ornithologists, and of course also with all 14 authors of
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09397140.2015.1023424, that Al-Sheikhly
et al. (2013) contains fabricated and/or falsified data. (....). Please send me a response in which the receipt of this e-mail is acknowledged and please contact me immediately in case there are errors and/or mistakes in my texts. Yours sincerely, Klaas van Dijk"
I received the next day a response. "From: Claire Redhead; To: Klaas van Dijk; Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2017 4:15 PM; Dear Klaas, I informed you in my email of March 10th that we would be following our Member Investigation Procedure. We completed stage 1 and this included presenting the case and the evidence to the full OASPA Board of Directors (excluding Caroline Sutton). The decision communicated to you this morning was therefore made by the full OASPA board (excluding Caroline Sutton). Under this process we will not be progressing to stage 2. Sincerely, Claire".
So even "the full OASPA board (excluding Caroline Sutton)" supports the main conclusion of the 'Final investigation on serious allegations of fabricated and/or falsified data in Al-Sheikhly
et al. (2013, 2015) - 1 July 2016' that the paper on the breeding biology of the Basra Reed Warber by Omar Al-Sheikhly contains fabricated and/or falsified data.
A list of members of the board of OASPA is mentioned on
http://oaspa.org/about/board/ They are:
* Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Chair
* Eelco Ferwerda of OAPEN Foundation, Secretary
* Rhodri Jackson of Oxford University Press, Treasurer
* Carrie Calder of Springer Nature
* Catriona MacCallum of PLOS
[Caroline Sutton of Taylor & Francis Group]
* Xenia van Edig of Copernicus Publications
* Mark Patterson of eLife
* Lars Bjørnshauge of DOAJ
* Pete Binfield of PeerJ ,
https://peerj.com/
So all these people agree with all authors of Porter
et al (2015a,b) that the paper on the breeding biology of the Basra Reed Warbler contains fabricated and/or falsified data. That's an excellent development, in particular when one looks to the backgrounds and the experiences of all these experts.