Anil Potti posts restored to Retraction Watch following false DMCA claim

As expected, ten Retraction Watch posts about Anil Potti that were mistakenly removed for a false Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice have been restored.

Automattic, which runs WordPress, notified us tonight of the move, which comes two weeks after the original notice. The claim against Retraction Watch was ridiculous, of course; a site in India plagiarized our posts, then claimed we had violated their copyright. That site, perhaps not surprisingly, has been taken down.

In the meantime, another site has been hit with a DMCA notice for a post about Potti, and Potti has told us that he had nothing to do with the takedown notice filed against us.

If you missed those posts — one of which is an accounting of Potti’s retraction record so far — here they are:

Anil Potti tells Retraction Watch he wasn’t behind DMCA takedown notices of posts about him

We have an update on an evolving and puzzling story involving our posts about Anil Potti that have been temporarily removed from Retraction Watch.

Someone claiming to be Anil Potti — and whom we have good reason to believe is actually him, for reasons we’ll get into — emailed us tonight to say that he had “no part whatsoever” in the takedown of Retraction Watch posts about him:

Another site hit with DMCA takedown notice for post about Anil Potti

Retraction Watch readers may recall that earlier this month, WordPress removed ten of our posts about Anil Potti — the former Duke oncology researcher who has retracted or corrected 19 papers — after a false DMCA copyright claim against us. The site which claimed the copyright violations — and which no longer exists — actually plagiarized our posts, not the other way around.

We’re still waiting for those posts to be reinstated; our understanding is that they’ll be back later this week. In the meantime, Nanopolitan, another site that wrote about Potti has been hit with what looks like a false DMCA claim.

Blogger, Nanopolitan’s host, has taken down one post. One of the owners of Nanopolitan, Abi, writes:

WordPress removes Anil Potti posts from Retraction Watch in error after false DMCA copyright claim

If you went looking for ten of our posts about Anil Potti today, you would have seen error messages instead. That’s because someone claiming to be from a news site in India alleged we violated their copyright with those ten posts about the former Duke University cancer researcher who has had 19 papers retracted, corrected, or partially retracted.

The truth of the matter, as is often the case, is exactly the opposite of the allegations. Here’s the email we received from Automattic — which owns WordPress, our blog host — earlier today:

Another retraction for Anil Potti, with an inscrutable notice

We’ve seen a lot of retraction notices for work by Anil Potti — 10, to be precise, along with 7 corrections and one partial retraction notice. As notices go, they tend to be pretty complete. So when we saw one in CHEST for this 2008 abstract, we were expecting something similar.

Instead, we were confused.

Here’s the notice:

Anil Potti resurfaces with job at North Dakota cancer center

Anil Potti, the former Duke cancer researcher who has now retracted or corrected 18 papers amidst investigations into his work, is now working at a Grand Forks, North Dakota, cancer center.

The Grand Forks Herald reports that Potti has worked at the Cancer Center of North Dakota since May. His new boss, William Noyes, told the paper that

Lead author of major breast cancer study announced at ASCO co-authored two corrected papers with Anil Potti

One of the biggest stories so far out of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting that just ended in Chicago was that of T-DM1, which, according to Ivan’s Reuters colleagues, “extended the length of time breast cancer patients lived without their disease getting worse.” (The news was even the subject of an embargo break.)

The widely-hailed study of Roche’s drug was led by Duke’s Kimberly Blackwell, who told The New York Times:

A “retraction in part” for Anil Potti and colleagues, in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics

A partial retraction has joined the ten retractions and five corrections of Anil Potti’s papers, this one of a 2008 paper in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. The move comes 14 months after the retraction of the Nature Medicine paper upon which much of the Molecular Cancer Therapeutics paper was based.

Here’s the notice:

Missouri medical board reprimands Anil Potti

Anil Potti, the former Duke oncology researcher who has now retracted ten papers amid continuing investigations into his work, has been reprimanded by the Missouri medical board.

The reprimand, which was first reported by DukeCheck, became effective on March 6. In it, the Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts noted that the North Carolina medical board had reprimanded Potti in November after he had

Update: Potti’s South Carolina medical license now listed as active

Updated at 1:40 p.m. Eastern: When original posted, this item reported, correctly, that the South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners’ website listed Anil Potti’s license as “suspended.” However, that status has now been changed to “active,” along with “No disciplinary action taken by the Board. This certifies that the above licensee is in good standing.” We are working to figure out why the status was changed.

Update, 1:55 p.m.: The Board tells us they made a mistake:

I looked into this matter and apparently this was a clerical error on our part because there are no public orders at this time. You should see this reflected on our licensee lookup system within 24 hours. Sorry for any confusion.

Anil Potti, the former Duke oncology researcher who lost his job at a South Carolina oncology practice earlier this week, has had his South Carolina medical license suspended, SCNow reports.

The South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners now lists Potti’s license — which he was granted on April 6, 2011 — as “suspended.” “active.”

We had a look at his other licenses.