Tag Archives: buried results

Cysteine and hangover: Finland fakes it first

Two marketing-related studies about the effects of “hangover cure”-products containing vitamins and l-cysteine were published just weeks apart. The first showed, that a certain Australian combination called Rapid Recovery does not alleviate hangover. The second allegedly showed that a Finnish product (Catapult Cat) works, but for some reason the authors claimed to have proven an effect and mechanism for l-cysteine.

There was quite a media buzz about the latter, mostly BS, so I’ll analyze these claims critically – the “upside” was already presented to the lay public. The news stories had no foundation, instead here we have a typical case of junk that passed through peer-review.

But now in chronological order:

Rapid Recovery

The Australian study was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, which is quite new but has already an impact factor of around 6, which is remarkable, and accelerating.

 

It enrolled 23 participants (planned: 25), 3 of which discontinued, leaving a sample of 20, 65% (13) of them female. For design details: see article. It was a frustrating task to find out which l-cysteine dose was given. According to the corresponding trial registration (>>), it had been 320mg, which is substantially lower than in the finnish trial below.  However, it’s described as a trial of a certain supplement, and therefore correct to report it that way.

A bunch of hangover scales, including the standard Hangover Severity Scale (HSS) and multiple laboratory parameters were used mainly on the mornings after two drinking sessions, one concluded with ingestion of the supplement, the other with placebo.

Because l-cysteine is often easily distinguishable from inert placebo (smell! stomach!), the participants were asked afterwards, if they guessed which treatment they received. This procedure is a quality marker for clinical trials with “soft” outcomes, i.e. such as questionnaires about mood, stress, etc. These are highly susceptible to the “amplified placebo” effect: If the person knows, which treatment was given, the answer is probably biased.

There was no significant difference between placebo and the supplement in hangover severity or any other measure. 60% (12 participants of 20) guessed correctly, what treatment they were given, but that’s well within what is expected by chance and had not influenced the results.

The authors reminded, that the physiology of hangover is largely unknown, and concluded, that this specific supplement does not mitigate any of its symptoms. Accordingly, either “administration of l-cysteine combined with B and C vitamins does not improve acetaldehyde metabolism”, or acetaldehyde does not cause alcohol hangover. I would add, it was at least not detectable with such a study.

Catapult Cat

Six weeks later, another study about a vitamin-cysteine supplement was published, this time in the smaller, lower-impact Alcohol and Alcoholism journal, which has nonetheless a good standing in the field. Its impact factor has dwindled over the years down to ~2. I certainly liked it for its short name in citations: Alcohol Alcohol looks reliably strange.

Interestingly, one of the “equally contributing” authors – Maria Palmen – is not a researcher, but a professional writer from an agency in Helsinki, where she’s listed as “editor, medicines”.

click for full-text article

The supplement tested here contained even more vitamins than Rapid Recovery, which had thiamine, pyridoxine and vitamin C added to l-cysteine. Catapult Cat is also made of riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), biotin (B7), folic acid (B9) and cobalamin (B12).

The main author, CJ Peter Eriksson, is neither a psychiatrist nor physiology or addiction expert but an associate professor for public health at the University of Helsinki, who started his career in the labs of state-monopoly ALKO chain. Erikssons has maintained for decades, that acetaldehyde is the main culprit for hangover. Thus he was the natural choice for Catapult Cat Oy, the maker of this supplement. Eriksson announces straight away to know “the truth”, as opposed to mainstream research, and the source he cites for this bold claim is: the man himself.

Industry-sponsored trials are known to produce results which pleasure the sponsor. In this case, Eriksson et al have employed so unusual measures to get their output looking “positive”, that they had to explain it away one after the other – or at least to try to. With a bit of background in clinical trial design, this makes it relatively easy to find the weaknesses.

The first difference to the Australian trial is the lack of measurements. No use of the standard scales, just one Likert scale had to do the job. Acetaldehyde was to be detected with a breath test, but this somehow failed (see full text).

The sample size was similar to the Rapid Recovery trial above, which means both were severely underpowered and at the same time prone to type I errors (aka false positive). The most eye-popping difference is that the finnish study excluded women – something they “forgot” to tell the media, and it’s also not in the abstract. One has to read the paywalled full-text version to know this.

The reasons for this shortcoming are unclear, the authors give a number of post-hoc considerations, which are impossible to check because the protocol is not available and the trial was not registered. It seems odd that “participating in different phases of the menstrual cyclus” was sufficient to exclude a female afterwards, and the exclusion of at least two women (possibly six) was not justified by any criteria. So the trial reports only on 19 men, further diminishing the statistical power and casting doubt on the validity: Why not report the male-female ratio, even when it’s 90%, but instead drop a third of the data?

One could reckon, also in the light of the negative trial above (which had 65% female), that inclusion of the female data would have rendered the results non-significant and prompted Eriksson’s team to drop this part, after the data came in. Left with so few data points, they came up with another bad idea: One-tailed testing.

This problem is best described here by the University of California, in short:

 

The researchers explain their choice of a one-tailed test with the expected direction of the results. They “knew” beforehand that Catapult Cat works by lowering acetaldehyde levels – but exactly THIS is what they had to prove first. The acetaldehyde levels were difficult to measure with the equipment they used.

But what data did they really analyze? That’s, well, confusing.

 

There is no explanation of “response”, so one is left with guessing. A closer look at the graphics makes me lose the last illusions about this study.

 

The individual data used for the different analyzes change with every item. It’s always another group of participants that is statistically tested. The researchers select from item to item the fitting data. And even by dropping again such a great portion of data, Eriksson et al managed to get one significant result, barely below the 0.05 threshold. The other isn’t even significant.

The same again with the rest of the items:

To use a simple picture: If you spray a playground full of children with water, and then only ask the smiling children if that’s a great thing, you aren’t testing the hypothesis “all children like mud”. The results are useless, although there is a plenty of anecdotal evidence and “experience” that children actually like to be dirty and jump into puddles. Some may dislike it, some maybe fear the reaction of adults. But if you are not testing for the whole picture but look the other way, it’s a worthless effort.

Needless to say, Eriksson et al did not ask their research subjects if they knew which treatment they received. So this possibility is not ruled out: The probands could have guessed when Catapult Cat was given, and responded in the expected way.

If that wasn’t enough failure for one study article, I did something I shouldn’t have done. I looked up the Editorial Board of the Journal. I did not expect to find anything like this.

Eriksson is on the “Editorial Advisory Board” and his long-time colleague and often co-author Anders Helander is the Associate Editor.

Before this last point, I thought maybe the dwindling journal wanted to land a scoop with this publication (and maybe that was also a motivation). Or, otherwise, there have been faked studies going through in the most prestigious journals on the planet (e.g. the Covid-19 articles in the Lancet and the NEJM). Why should a small journal do better?

But, unfortunately it looks like Eriksson sneaked it into the publication via well-worn channels, and a buddy helped with this to make sure it goes through.

Ironic footnote:

The sales boost from this study won’t probably rescue the company, which manufactures the supplement. It freshly appeared on the public list of insolvent debtors (protestilista.com) and owes especially to Pharmia Oy, its contract manufacturer. Catapult Cat Oy has not filed any balance for the last 2,5years and is set to be struck off the trade register, or to go into liquidation by November 2020.

Confirmed: Latest HumanCharger journal is junk

As I wrote earlier this year, there was a new study for the HumanCharger device done which appears now first under “Research” on Valkee’s marketing website humancharger.com.

humancharger-fakes-2017

Yesterday I got a confirmation from the official body responsible for scientific journal classification (the Publication Forum of Finland’s learned societies):

jufo-jnr

I asked for evaluation of this obscure HumanCharger journal – Journal of Neurology Research – which wasn’t even in the classification database, although it seems to exist since 2011. The professors of the JuFo panel 13 agreed with me and assigned the journal a Zero classification, i.e. it does not meet the basic criteria for scientific publication.

Therefore the institute at the University of Oulu will get 90% less funding for this particular publication. Additionally,  the first author cannot use it for his article-based thesis, for which he got a 24.000€ grant. He will have to explain why the research was dumped into a non-publication.

flyktman-vedatysThere would have been better uses for the grant money than the HumanCharger “research”, I’m sure.

(added) Bonus:

The journal in question sails already for a long time without Editor-in-chief, i.e. the person/scientist responsible for accepting or rejecting papers. That’s the most straightforward way to announce “acceptions aren’t done on scientific grounds”.

New HumanCharger study, old trick: Predatory publication

Here we go again: The finnish earlight maker Valkee Ltd has published its next study of their HumanCharger device. This time, it’s about neurotransmitters and proteins in “transcranially illuminated” mouse brain.

 

The article is published in the “open access” Journal of Neurology Research. The journal is published by Elmer Press, a canadian predatory Publisher.

jnrnew6

There are several Valkee/HumanCharger papers in questionable journals, so this is no surprise. Again, no real peer-reviewed publication wanted the finnish pseudoscience in its pages.

elmeri-funding

The scam company (here called “Valkee Inc.”) is listed as study sponsor, and most of the authors are related to Valkee. Interestingly, professor Timonen is not listed as a shareholder – that may have been “forgotten” to declare, or he really sold his stake.

The paper itself is just another junk article in a fake journal, but there are implications for the institute of professor Seppo Saarela at the University of Oulu, which oversaw this “research”. University funding is partially based on scientific publications, and a predatory article actually means a financial loss for the department.

A junk paper is counted with -90% (article worth x 0,1) according to present university law. Classification is done by the Publication Forum maintained by Finland’s learned societies. At the moment, the “Journal of Neurology Research” has not been classified officially by the institution. That’s possibly a reason why Valkee’s researchers did submit the paper to Elmer Press.

The main reason,  however, is that naive customers and investors can be fooled with another article. The paper cannot be found via standard database searches like PubMed/MedLine, so the results are unavailable and lost for the scientific community.

That may be a problem also for its main author, which got a 24.000€ grant (PDF p.37) from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation to produce a thesis on “Earlight effects on light-sensitive proteins in rodents’ brains”.

flyktman-vedatys

New (not so) independent study: Valkee’s HumanCharger is a placebo (Update)

The finnish earlight maker Valkee Ltd is putting all-in on the american market after plunging sales in Europe. Its product, the premium-priced placebo HumanCharger, is sold with wonder claims online by Walmart and others:

Walmart as a co-scammer!

  • Keep in sync, all the time: regular exposure to light helps maintain the rhythm of our natural body clock, so with HumanCharger you always feel “in sync”
  • Better sleep, better health: HumanCharger reduces the need for excess sleep and reduces food cravings associated with jetlag, tiredness and low energy levels

At the same time, the second independent study about the device’s effects (or the lack thereof) is published. The result … is the same as in all other placebo-controlled tests.

Independent trial: Valkee is a sleep and mood placebo

It is concluded that transcranial bright light, at times where conventional light therapy has phase-advancing properties, did not influence any sleep parameters differently than placebo.

This is by no means surprising, as the first independent trial, published in November 2013, came to similar conclusions with a somewhat different methodology. Valkee’s HumanCharger has no effects on circadian rhythms. The new independent study is from the University of Bergen, Norway. With 50 participants, it was adequately powered to detect any effects consistent with Valkee claims.

The company has admitted, that their earlight doesn’t have any physiological effect comparable to standard light therapy. Their own data also show, that it does not influence Melatonin or Cortisol like real light therapy. Now we know, it doesn’t improve or at least change sleep in any way.

The HumanCharger does not influence the biological clock.
No “better sleep. better health – sync with the sun”. It’s all made up.

Ironically, Valkee Ltd is just touring the US with exactly these false claims. The company has been presenting on the Consumer Electronics Show CES2016 from Jan 6-9 in Las Vegas. It would be interesting to see the reactions of any resellers, when they realize that the HumanCharger again is scientifically demonstrated to be humbug.

 

Update 1: I got the study pdf. Cool, that was fast! Big thanks to J. – and to all the other nice readers whose support I am experiencing regularly.

Update 2: According to the small print in the full text, Valkee Ltd paid 12.000 Euros for this trial. That’s more than for the ice hockey trial a few years ago. But they did not get full control over the results and the publishing. Literally a bad investment. (16.1.2016)

Two Valkee trials declared published junk (X-mas special 5)

Dozens of hilarious details about Valkee Ltd’s HumanCharger scam go untold because they don’t warrant a full blog post. As a present for Christmas Day, here’s the best of all.

The Valkee “research” group has published a number of trial results in unfavorable ways:

The only positive trial with evidence value for Valkee in a scientific journal was the one with the 22 ice hockey players supposedly pimped by earlight to better reaction, published in Frontiers in Physiology.

I say it was, because it had been until now.

It is a real pleasure for me to tell you, that this very special journal series was officially elevated to junk status, by Scholarly Open Access. That’s the No.#1 authority. The list is used by, for example, finnish universities to determine the standing of a publication.

christmas for gloom, frontiers and valkee!

With it, a second Valkee study goes down the tube, which is no longer on their website. It was in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

The decision was overdue: The fake peer-review was obvious in the ice hockey article, where one of the authors was among the editors, and a dance instructor with no idea was assigned to review it by her lab boss. That’s not a fluke. It’s systematic pseudoscience done by Frontiers.

Is there anything left of Valkee’s evidence, among the ruins?

According to usually well-informed sources, there is one final blow still coming.
A nice Christmas to all and a Happy New Year!

HumanCharger study done to counter critics, disappears again (X-mas special 4)

Dozens of hilarious details about Valkee Ltd’s HumanCharger scam go untold because they don’t warrant a full blog post. As a Christmas present, here are some of such pearls.

When Finland’s Valkee Ltd re-launched their earlight device in 2015 under its new name HumanCharger, there was an exceptional piece among all the PR articles which simply reuttered their press release.

Fierce Biotech criticism

This is the first placebo-controlled trial ever conducted for a bright-light device, the company said.[SIC!] The data may be designed, at least in part, to address allegations widely publicized online that the company’s product is a scam.

Stacey Lawrence of Fierce Biotech had a bright moment.

You may wonder how the company can be forced into a study because of this blog and a few articles elsewhere. And how could they possibly even succeed?

Simple as it is: Valkee bought the “evidence”. The study has disappeared from the net and Valkee’s websites again, but is still available in full from earlightswindle.com/gloom (PDF). The small-print in the last paragraph reads:

We would like to thank Clinius Ltd., an independent company, which conducted the study on behalf of Valkee Ltd.

The study is not done for any scientific purpose and as such unethical from the start. And it’s unclear who the real investigators were. Clinius is a company from Helsinki, Finland.

 

Stay tuned for the next part tomorrow, and the best of all on December 24th!

New placebo-controlled, buried Valkee trial identified (X-mas special 3)

Dozens of hilarious details about Valkee Ltd’s HumanCharger scam go untold because they don’t warrant a full blog post. As a Christmas present, here are some of such pearls.

My deepest apologies. We misrepresented a clinical study in our YLE MOT TV program, and so did all those people after us, who reviewed Valkee’s stuff systematically. We were mislead by the company, but that’s no excuse.

The critical point with Valkee’s earlight is the obvious lack of placebo-controlled studies for the claims in Seasonal Affective Disorder. Valkee Ltd told it’s easy, and they will come up with great results. They never did.

We do know, however, that they attempted such a study 3 times: One was halted, one is completely buried, and the third showed the device to be non-inferior to placebo by a small margin. This result was falsified then, because it would have obviously stopped the whole scam at once.

Juuso Nissilä of Valkee gave an interview back in 2012.

placebo controlled data surfaced

Unlike other bright light therapies, the Valkee unit has been tested in a placebo-controlled trial. ‘You can’t tell, when it’s in your ears, […], it’s possible to have a placebo,’ Nissilä explained.

The trial, with 26 patients receiving treatment and a control group of 23, showed that depression – […] – decreased when the device was used for 12 minutes per day.

That is, to my knowledge, the halted one with 60 persons to participate. It actually had results which never officially surfaced. Valkee’s then-board member Timo Takala, at the same time “researching” his product, told the reporter it was because of low enrollment. That’s what I remember, this part was not broadcasted.

It fits: They had at least 26+23=49 patients of planned 60 when the data was unblinded to the investigators. That’s to say, the trial was dumped then. When the investigators know such interim results, it cannot be continued anymore.

Valkee initiated the notorious 3-group trial in November 2010 with 90 participants, later to be faked. But the “halted” trial was projected to run through that very same winter. Registered completion was March 2011. That means it was not halted for low enrollment. They could have continued. But they recruited patients for the other and declared the first to be failed. Entry criteria and study design were the same.

I won’t comment any longer, it would be too speculative. The real reasons for disrupting the placebo-controlled trial are unknown. Nissilä’s comment reads to me like “symptoms decreased in both groups”, i.e. placebo performed as well as earlight. The similar result as in all other placebo-controlled tests.

Once again, crucial placebo-controlled results remain buried by Valkee Ltd. WHY?
(Ok, that’s pathetic to ask.)

The Christmas Special continues tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Valkee’s jet lag trial, full text: No “HumanCharger” at all (Update)

Valkee Ltd seems to have completely abandoned its SAD claims, now the device is called “HumanCharger” and works – clinically tested! – on jet lag. Marketing bubbles re-used: They only changed some words in their PR stuff, the rest is the same as for SAD. The same unproven claims.

as jet-lag cure ...

as jet-lag cure …

... and for Seasonal Affective Disorder!

… and for Seasonal Affective Disorder!

Needless to say, these things were never tested. Valkee logic: Because it is approved for SAD, and those are SAD symptoms, it works on these. Therefore, it does the same for jet lag users!

The whole jet lag campaign is based on a study, which appeared already on April 1st in the journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance. Valkee says that this proves a jet lag effect. Its SAD studies are all on the Valkee website, this one remained behind the paywall. Typical Valkee users and marketing folks don’t need the facts and are better off without it. To pay 30 Dollars for a Valkee paper? Simply believe!

Update 12.6.17:40: The study is now available from Valkee HumanCharger, direct download from the site. It is not linked yet from any of their sites, and not found neither by google nor google scholar. It was added in the meantime to a press release. The leak for this post was several weaks ago.

Now one of Valkee’s little helpers did not get the memo, and leaked the document into the public domain. I can mirror it here without doing something illegal:

The full text of Valkee’s jet lag trial (4,6 Mb)

I do not have the spare time to comment, but the main outcome is, that the device did not work on practically all things measured. No significant difference at the end of the predefined treatment period for 10 of at least eleven tested scores. Only one subscale of the POMS brought a significance, and this can be explained with multiple testing.

The funny point: It was the fatigue subscale. Exactly the same single result, as the homeopathic “remedy” No-Jet-Lag got in its own company trial.

recover "twice as fast" with homeopathy!

recover “twice as fast” with homeopathy!

The difference: The homeopathic treatment is to be taken orally, during the flight. The Valkee device must be used for 6 (six!) days after the flight, 4 (four!) times a day to get to the same result. 24 treatment sessions.

Valkee is nearly as good as the leading homeopathic treatment.

placebo

 

***

Addition: The analysis was done on 52 patients, but the article speaks of 55 (Figure 3). What happened to the rest? Drop-outs happened, but are not reported. The whole statistics are invalidated. Incredible that this got through peer review.

Valkee’s Research: What a Waste!

An extensive article about the Valkee scam was in the Ylioppilaslehti paper. Many new findings, like I promised earlier this year. I don’t have the time to translate it. Always remember the official statement:

The chancellor (rector) of the University of Oulu, Lauri Lajunen, says that Valkee Ltd. did not emerge from research at the university. It had partially sponsored some trials, but there is no scientific cooperation or any other kind of links to the university.

”Valkee’s web pages can easily create the impression, that they have clear scientific evidence, and are based on research done at the University of Oulu. I checked this with our lawyers, and we as an University now have to contact Valkee about this”, Lajunen says.

* * *

A side product was a list of all studies by the Valkee group, or what they claim to have done, and all other earlight-related stuff as per Sep 3, 2014. It is 100% complete with links to papers and should replace the outdated research page at earlightswindle.com.

XLS: All Earlight and Valkee studies, September 2014.

It’s long. I really suggest to have a look. I’m still shocked how far they were allowed to go, and what level of pseudoscience can be done at a finnish university.

Remember that such trials are expensive. Valkee has burned investors’ and tax money for years. And how could any ethics commission still give an OK for more studies?

After all, they could have simply accomplished a straightforward placebo-controlled trial at any point. (BTW they did, but it did not work.) Every unbiased scientist would have stopped this nonsense long ago.

No need for more “research” on an ear lamp scam born over a drink.

Study: Valkee’s earlight does not improve athletes’ performance

Even in Finland, the SAD season is too short for Valkee Ltd to survive the summer months. Thus, the company seeks to ensure revenue by promoting the scam device for jet-lag, sports performance, and many other things .

In winter 2013/14 they started a campaign with Jarkko Nieminen, a finnish tennis pro. Sponsored by Valkee, he tells in childish, poorly ghost-written words to perform better with the earlight (although he actually only loses ATP ranks since he’s “using” it).

 

Background

The company shows around a 2011 study with Oulu’s Kärpät hockey team. In May 2014 Valkee fanfared that it’d been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Since such claims were always false so far, it would be an enormous achievement if true.

The following information is from Valkee’s article, and from the TV testimony of the study’s main author, Mikko Tulppo, if not stated otherwise.

Valkee bought the study from the rehab and research firm Verve in Oulu for 10.000 Euros. A remarkably low price for the tremendous marketing effect coming with Finland’s serial champions (they just took also the 2014 championship). Tulppo and Valkee’s CSO Nissilä worked together before, which may explain the discount.

 

How was the study done?

The study took place in October 2011 (Tulppo said November). There were 10 matches in 24 days. Twenty-two players did participate. Eleven got an earlight device. The other 11 got a defective earlamp which produced no light at all – the so-called placebo group. All were instructed to keep the earplugs, lighted or not, in the ears at home every morning for 12 minutes. They should keep a diary for observations possibly related to the study.

Mikko Tulppo on YLE TV

Mikko Tulppo on YLE TV (MOT)

Before and after the 3 weeks treatment, at least these 8 outcomes were recorded:

  • reaction time to a visual signal (a yellow light)
  • motor time (hand movement to press a button)
  • total time from signal to effect, i.e. light … button pressed
  • reaction time to an audio signal (a beep)
  • motor time (hand movement to press the button)
  • total time from signal to effect
  • a memory test
  • sleep quality (VAS, visual analog scale).

 

What were the results?

Initially, all outcomes were negative – No significant changes (sleep data not shown):

valkee-results-karpat-oulu

The authors then used a data torturing technique to make at least one outcome positive: Adjusting for age brought a difference for the motor time to visual signal measure in the earlight group, marked in the table. The reaction time was unchanged, also the most important stimulus → action outcome.

Dredging with the Bonferroni test brought post-hoc (!) a success within the earlight group for the motor time component. Despite the variety of statistical tools available, the other 7 of the 8 outcomes stayed negative.

Side effects are not mentioned, but at least one player from the sham group had to stop after three days. He got no earlight – but severe sleep problems from the strong nocebo. Although not all 22 players completed the trial, handling of such dropouts was not described. However, it dictates the results.

 

Where are the bugs?

Even the authors state that the study was probably not double-blind – it cannot be, if one gets a lightless lamp home in a light treatment trial. The correct conclusion: Even with open treatment, the device’s placebo effect did not produce significant changes.

The paper, full of orthographic mistakes, holds another nonsense claim:

  • “light treatment was administered during the darkest time of the year”

The trial was conducted in October, shortly after the autumn equinox, which is the same even in Oulu. Day length in mid-October is nearly 10 hours there, just one hour less than in London. The darkest time of the year has only 3,5 hrs day light in Oulu (Dec 22). Whoever reviewed this paper was apparently not familiar with the european calendar.

By far the most significant problem, however, is that the players’ true strain was ignored. The paper tells

  • potential confusing factors like training load, competitions, and travel are virtually identical within the team

Why wasn’t corrected for time on ice? It’s readily available, and stands probably also for other confounders. An injured player would not play. He trains differently. A player who is perfectly fit at the beginning may be tired after 10 matches. Databases indicate sharp differences during the trial (jatkoaika.com):

  • Of the twenty Kärpät players from the first match, 15 played also the last.
  • 27 athletes were on ice during the trial period.
  • 15 of them appeared in 9 or 10 out of 10 matches.
  • Six persons played only on 1 – 4 of all 10 occasions.

karpat-stats-oct-2011

Thus, the results are completely meaningless. With such a low quality, the study would not be accepted for a peer-reviewed journal.

 

How was the paper published?

Announced by Valkee’s frontend Timo Ahopelto for April 2012, the article appeared 2 years later. Ahopelto told repeatedly that it is under review somewhere. Received for his final resting place in February 2014, it must have been submitted to at least 4 other journals before. Possibly there were more fruitless submissions.

Frontiers in Physiology is one of dozens similar journals by the swiss company Frontiers Media SA, known for dubious practices – just what to expect from any predatory publisher. Started recently, it’s available electronically only. The Nature Publishing Group owns the company, and thus participates in the boom of more or less suspicious open access publications. The business model “pay-for-publication” without editorial interference reached the big players.

The journal is not indexed for MedLine, which accepts only quality journals. The surprising twist: It slipped into the PubMedCentral repository of free articles, and because PubMedCentral is raked regularly by PubMed with the eCollection stamp, it got a PubMed citation. “MedLine and “PubMed” are nowadays synonyms, blurring the borders between the worlds, and between real and fake peer-review.

see the difference?

see the difference?

Frontiers in scamming: Valkee article

Frontiers in scamming: Valkee article

Frontiers in Physiology has no real peer-review. The journal’s website says, that it is very unlikely to get an article rejected, and so the Valkee paper got accepted: The associate editor for the Exercise Physiology part assigned it to one of his subordinates at his workplace, the “Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology” of the University of Florida.

Their homepage promotion: Daniel Wolpert Ph.D. explains, ‘Why we need a brain?

This assignee is an experienced dance instructor from Korea, which explains her unawareness of the European calendar (see above). Seemingly not confronted before with clinical trials and (other than descriptive) statistics, she could do nothing else and returned the paper to her boss. He okayed it.

Peer-review usually means that two or more independent reviewers from the same field look at the paper. They shall certainly not be dependent from the editor.

While Frontiers is praising their “efficient” process, it would not surprise if more suspect publishers sprang on board. Valkee has shown again, that they are able to cheat beyond the last frontier of academic credibility. As the company is armed with time and money, we have hardly seen the last junk study from the earlight scam.