PLOS’ Weak Response

PLOS has been quiet lately, but the PNAS paper about scientific fraud at scale led to them being called out — and yesterday they attempted to respond via a post on their site.

Let’s make this quick.

Both parties in the exchange — the authors of the PNAS paper and the editor responding for PLOS — are framing the issue incorrectly and therefore missing the point, one we addressed in our podcast last week:

• This isn’t happening due to natural factors without somebody benefiting from it, most likely financially — this is happening because people are pushing money around the system for various reasons, mainly for profit, but potentially some of it is money laundering