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Republication with 5 years delay

Posted by Marcel_Leist on 17 Sep 2014 at 20:50 GMT

Someting strange happened here. Everything described in this paper has been done many years before, but much more extensive (Chambers 2009). Since then, it has been republished and used many, many, many times. And now the paper by Watanapanitch publishes the same very basic findings again. It is straight and honest. They do not even try to introduce a small new modification or another claim of novelty.
I do also explicitly not speak here of misconduct of the referees and editors. No. This would also be an unsupported statement I do not want to make.
But in such a case, it would be interesting to learn why the referees thought the paper should be published. I like PlosOne as a journal, and also its policy that the soundness of the data should be checked by the referees, but not the scientific impact or the extent of novelty. This should be left to the readers, and this is fine. Providing that there is any novelty at all! After all, it does not make sense to publish the same paper 20 times. There must be a mechanism to decide, what is a technical reproduction, and what is a new research paper. In this case the mechanism has failed, and it is important for the journal to think about strategies to improve on this.....


Chambers SM, Fasano CA, Papapetrou EP, Tomishima M, Sadelain M, Studer L. Highly efficient neural conversion of human ES and iPS cells by dual inhibition of SMAD signaling. Nat Biotechnol. 2009 Mar;27(3):275-80.

No competing interests declared.
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