Research misconduct and the INTERGROWTH-21st study

www.thelancet.com Published online August 22, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31365-X 1 Submissions should be made via our electronic submission system at http://ees.elsevier.com/ thelancet/ Oxford University, without consulting our group, the very investigators involved in the WHO study. When we learned that WHO and Oxford University were about to settle the case without having addressed our major concerns about misconduct— including the details of the competing interests statement, not fulfilling the commission covered by the stipend, and delaying the WHO study— merely on the basis of the question of plagiarism, our research team immediately reacted. The entire WHO Fetal Growth Study research team demanded an independent investigation including all issues and parties. WHO agreed, but Oxford University disagreed. We still do not understand why an institution such as Oxford University repeatedly should decline an independent review of concerns about scientific misconduct, unless they had something to hide. We do not feel that an institution for whom a grant of £29 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was at stake can be regarded as unbiased in this case. In our view, Oxford University’s claim of complete investigation is spurious. They have never sought data from ourselves, nor, equally importantly, from one of their own former faculty members who had been on the WHO Fetal Growth Study advisory committee. Transparency does not seem to have been the involved institutions’ priority. We never received access to the full report of Oxford University’s assessment, the external risk assess­ ment commissioned by WHO, the questions WHO requested another four external experts to address or the content of their report, or the letter that WHO sent to the General Medical Council. Interestingly, The Lancet editors received some of these documents. We also wish to clarify that the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) did not look into the merits of the charges, but only into matters of due process at the journals affected. Research misconduct and the INTERGROWTH21st study