Clare Francis scores a bullseye: Journal of Cell Biology paper retracted for image manipulation

If you’re a journal editor or publisher, there’s a good chance your email inbox has seen its share of emails from “Clare Francis,” who has been crusading against text and image duplication in papers for some years now. Some editors have grown quite weary of those emails, sometimes because they don’t want to deal with anonymous whistleblowers, and sometimes because they have found Clare’s claims to be without merit.

But the Journal of Cellular Biology is one journal that has apparently continued to take them seriously. Today, they retract “Follistatin induction by nitric oxide through cyclic GMP: a tightly regulated signaling pathway that controls myoblast fusion,” a 2006 paper about which Francis first raised concerns in early November. Here’s the notice, one of those wonderfully detailed ones that make us squeal like schoolgirls meeting the Beatles:

Authors, including highly cited cancer researcher, blame “clerical error” for image mixup in paper

The Journal of Experimental Medicine has issued a correction for a 2011 paper by Michael Karin, a prominent cancer researcher at the University of California, San Diego, after learning about a “clerical error” in one of the figures.

According to the notice for the article, “Constitutive intestinal NF-κB does not trigger destructive inflammation unless accompanied by MAPK activation,”