By Kamal Pratap Singh, Managing Editor- Biotech Express
It was very surprising to me when I first saw our Advisory Board Member Prof Ashok Pandey’s name in retraction news written by The Hindu, but my sorrow ended soon when I saw in detail the reasons for which retractions were done. Earlier also Biotech Express has advocated for suffering scientists from India who could have lost papers due to small reasons like little pliagarism, some authorship conflicts etc.
Soon I realize it is not a scenario of serious concerns because someone ‘Single Handed’ has tried to malign his image when he could not compete. Single reason for retraction i.e. authorship conflict clearly shows that when he or she could not find anything w.r.t science, he indulged Prof Pandey in Journal administration puzzle.
Only people close to him would understand how he is promoting biotechnology in each corner of the country and internationally and how many people he communicates each day. He is highly decorated scientist having fellowship of more than 10 science organizations FBRS, FTWAS, FNASc, FNA, FRSB, FIOBB, FAMI, FISEES, FICS, FWSSET ; has ~1600 publications/communications; 16 patents, 108 books, ~850 papers and book chapters, etc with h index of 142 and >57,000 citations (Google scholar). He is Adjunct/Visiting Professor/Scientist in universities in France, Brazil, Canada, China, Korea, South Africa, and Switzerland and also in several universities in India, which would let us think how vast his network is.
Prof Ashok Pandey, certainly a globally recognized researcher for his significant contributions in cross-fields of Industrial and Environmental Biotechnology and Energy Biosciences, and science management leadership role is being targeted by controversies after the Hindu reported retraction of 12 papers, citing authorship reasons (he became author of papers he edited). Hindu report has tried to simply hype the matter (with an intention to malign his name), without looking or knowing the facts and analyzing the papers deeply. The report’s intention to malign Prof Pandey is further obvious that it made an attempt to somehow relate this matter with the papers earlier retracted in 2019 by IITR scientists.
The most important point here to note is that neither the quality of research not scientific data has been questioned in any of these papers; the retraction is based on charges of authorship changes and editorial process. Unfortunately, some people all round the world, including India see this as an opportunity to malign (including those who have been angry with him as their papers were rejected by BITE and some others who are very jealous of him) such a highly knowledgeable science researcher and leader’s credentials and contributions.
In this article we will see what exactly has happened and why this retraction is a biased and unfair decision.
To begin with, let’s see what are the reasons given by Elsevier in these retractions. The first one is about the authorship change during the revision stage of the papers. In this regard, the publishers rule clearly states that if an author is added or deleted at the revision stage, the journal manager should raise a query with the corresponding author to give an explanation about this. However, no such query was raised by the journal manager for any of the papers, hence, (corresponding) authors assumed that the change was accepted by the journal. What way now after several years of publication, Elsevier should charge Prof Pandey for this? It is clearly evident that it is an effort to harm the name and fame of Prof Pandey (probably for some compulsions of Elsevier such as global criticism for its policies, etc) for no fault of his.
The second stated reason in these papers is about the review process. Let’s see the rule position for this also. In this regard, the publishers rule clearly states that if an editor’s name is there among the list of authors of the papers, the editor should be blinded by the journal (manager). But this was not done by the journal manager, showing fault again with the journal/Elsevier, not Prof Pandey.
Thus, for both the charges put by Elsevier, it is quite clear that there was no mistake or misconduct by Prof Pandey.
Let’s also see a very important point here. Prof Pandey was appointed EiC in 2011 and his contract was renewed several times (in 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022). One would simply understand a point here that if the contract was renewed by Elsevier, it was simply based on satisfactory performance of Pandey as EiC, which obviously included editorial and ethical conduct. How and why, suddenly after 13 years, Elsevier found fault on him and charged?
The above details very clearly show that the decision to retract the papers is a biased and highly unfair decision, without any basis and intended to harm the name and fame of Prof Pandey, which has contributed so significantly for the growth of not only this journal, making it as the first choice to publish by the authors from all over the world, but also helped Elsevier’s in many other projects, including launching of a new journal (BITE Reports) and creating and launching BIORESTEC, the flagship conference of BITE, among others.
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- Source: https://biotechexpressmag.com/unjustifiable-to-trap-prof-ashok-pandey-the-top-biotechnologist-from-india-in-the-game-of-publishing-conduct/