Tuller & Racaniello writing again Trish Groves/BMJ: Yet Another Go-Round with BMJ Open

http://www.virology.ws/2018/03/26/trial-by-error-yet-another-go-round-with-bmj-open/

Trish Groves and the BMJ have such an appalling record on CFS. And it's continuing here.

 

I' m crap at Twitter. There are a number of tweets re BMJ exposure of dodgy paper on stents ( switching end points) . I follow aseem malhotra who has picked up on this. It might be useful to link to the thread to highlight this and the dodgy stats underpinning this illness paradigm for those that can use it effectively?
Double standard effectively illustrated

 

@dave30th - I wonder if it's worth contacting Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, to try to get an idea of what's what. He wrote a blog post pushing for release of the PACE trial data in the run-up to the tribunal.

 

We certainly need to find some way to answer the question is the BMJ Open's editorial and peer review system incompetent and allowing through lots of articles with procedural and methodological flaws or is it that it is corrupt specifically allowing the BPS brigade to publish badly administered and flawed studies and protecting them from any fall out?

I am assuming it is primarily incompetence and laziness, taking at face value the claims of high profile academics, without following due process and then colluding the hide both the researchers' and the journal's mistakes to save face. Though [deleted extra 'though'] given it is happening regularly with BPSer articles perhaps this is naive.

 

"The organisers of a major clinical trial have been accused of moving the goalposts by quietly changing the study’s primary endpoints shortly before reporting its results."

sounds familiar

 

Peter, I don't know. You only have to read the school absence paper to see it's not service evaluation. In the open peer review, a BPS colleague raised serious questions about the lack of ethical review. Crawley gave absurd non-answers, which I pointed out in my first post about the issue. The journal just let her get away with it. Now the current cover-up is obviously completely deliberate.

 

Which probably means directly trying to get the perpetrators to come clean is a not going to happen, without other pressures coming to bear. The work so far is an excellent clarification of what is wrong, and maybe the political angle is needed, underpinned by that information, to get any further? When you reach a stalemate from one direction, maybe encourage pressure to come from another direction?

 

I think now that the groundwork is there, other press coverage would help. Either by me or by others. I am trying to figure that one out now. Maximum public embarrassment is the only thing that will work.