J.T. Scopes Lectures

This distinguished lecture series will be launched in 2022. It is named after John T. Scopes, the Tennessee science teacher involved in the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” who was charged and convicted for teaching evolution in a Dayton, TN high school in 1925. The “J. T. Scopes Lecture” series aims to highlight the work of high-profile scientists that speak truth to power and defend science.

Our first J. T. Scopes Lecture will be March 2nd, 2022 at 3:10pm CST. Register here >>.

Elisabeth Bik, Ph.D.

Independent Scientific Integrity Investigator

Science builds upon science. Even after peer-review and publication, science papers could still contain images or other data of concern. If not addressed post-publication, papers containing incorrect or even falsified data could lead to wasted time and money spent by other researchers trying to reproduce those results. Several high-profile science misconduct cases have been described, but many more cases remain undetected.

Elisabeth Bik is an image forensics detective who left her paid job in industry to search for and report biomedical articles that contain errors or data of concern. She has done a systematic scan of 20,000 papers in 40 journals and found that about 4% of these contained inappropriately duplicated images. In her talk she will present her work and show several types of inappropriately duplicated images and other examples of research misconduct. In addition, she will show how to report scientific papers of concern, and how journals and institutions handle such allegations.

Elisabeth was recently awarded the John Maddox Prize. “The 2021 John Maddox Prize for standing up for science is awarded to microbiologist Dr Elisabeth Bik in recognition of her outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers, including image manipulation, plagiarism, data manipulation and methodological concerns.” – from the story linked above.