Skip Nav | Home | Mobile | Editorial Guidelines | Mission Statement | About Us | Contact | Help | Security | Support Us

Wales

Hidden Article

This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

UK and US Academics exposed for scientific fraud

The snake man | 09.08.2013 08:23 | Bio-technology | Ecology | Other Press | London | Wales

A Wales based Academic Wolfgang Wuster and two associates, one at Harvard have been found guilty of serious misconduct and academic fraud.
Wuster has gone further and commenced a war against the rules of Zoological Nomenclature, threatening the progress made in the biological sciences in the last 200 years.

An academic at the prestigious Harvard University, Mr. Van Wallach has been shown to have committed scientific fraud for a second time.
A paper published last month showed that Van Wallach in 2009 committed an act of fraud to attempt to steal naming rights for a genus of Cobras from an Australian zoologist, Raymond Hoser.
On 21 September 2009, Wallach and two associates published a paper in the journal Zootaxa “naming” a group of Cobras “Afronaja”. The major issue wasn’t that Hoser had already named the same animals as Spracklandus six months earlier, but rather the false and fraudulent claims made by Wallach and the others to justify their audacious move.
To justify their action, Wallach and others claimed that the Hoser journal, Australasian Journal of Herpetology had not been published in hard copy and was therefore invalid according to the Zoological Code. However, in writing Wallach had earlier sent an e-mail to Hoser seeking hard copies of the said journal, meaning that at all materially relevant times, he was fully aware that the earlier journal had been validly published in hard copy.
Of greater significance was the misleading claim in the Wallach paper that him and his friends had done a global search for hard copies of the Hoser journal but been unable to find any.
That the alleged search results was fraudulent was shown by the fact that the men chose not to look in the one place that the Zoological Rules said hard copies should be sent to, namely Zoological Record and that they never sought a list from Hoser as to where copies were sent. The men made it clear in their publication that they had a copy of these rules and had read them.
Shortly after the Van Wallach paper was published, Hoser contacted the authors and advised them their claims against his original paper was false and provided evidence in support of the fact. Co-author Wuster acknowledged receipt of this information.
This didn’t however stop Wallach and his friends Wolfgang Wuster and Don Broadley from continuing to peddle their lie in relation to the original Hoser publications over the next two years and also widening it to include several other Hoser papers, putting the stability of several scientific names in jeopardy.
Finally, more than two years later, Hoser retaliated by publishing the details of the scientific fraud by Wallach and the others. He did this in another paper in Australasian Journal of Herpetology issue 9.
Within the journal was copies of e-mails, library receipts and the like proving that not only had the original February 2009 paper by Hoser been validly published in hard copy, but more importantly that Wallach and the others were fully aware of this when they committed their fraud.
It also came to light that Wallach had engaged in a similar scientific fraud in 2006. On that occasion he tried to usurp naming rights on a genus of blind snakes. He then published a description of a genus “Austrotyphlops” claiming that an earlier description of the same genus under the name of Sivadictus by Wells and Wellington in 1985 wasn’t valid as it lacked a diagnosis. But an inspection of the original description by Wells and Wellington (p. 41), yields an extensive diagnosis, showing that again Wallach had lied in a bid to improperly usurp someone else’s naming rights on a genus of snakes.
Fraudulent and dishonest conduct by people paid as scientists is rarely exposed, so this case should be widely disseminated and widely reported so as to act as a disincentive for other academics to engage in similar practices.
Australasian Journal of Herpetology Issue 9 can be obtained as either hard copy or online at:  http://www.herp.net

The snake man
- Homepage: http://www.snakeman.com.au

Publish

Publish your news

Do you need help with publishing?

/regional publish include --> /regional search include -->

Wales Topics

Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista

Kollektives

Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

Server Appeal Radio Page Video Page Indymedia Cinema Offline Newsheet

secure Encrypted Page

You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.

If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

IMCs


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech