JOSHA’s Critical Review of “Von der Guten Wissenschaft zum wissenschaftlichen Fehlverhalten” by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rommelfanger

Ulrich Rommelfanger’s paper addresses the complex issue of academic misconduct. With respect to claiming financial damage due to plagiarism, he overlooks the fact that, as a rule, the author of the original text had to assign his copyright to the academic publisher before publication. The reader wonders what is the point of all the fuss and the appeal to professors to take action against plagiarism if no copyright holder is demanding damages. From JOSHA's point of view, the fight against data fabrication, deliberate falsification and misinterpretation is much more important. This actually causes immense damage to patients, subsequent research, sponsors and society as a whole. Here, Rommelfanger remains brief and resigned to the lack of effective control by peer reviews. The third key area of scientific misconduct, the obstruction of publications by partisan representatives of academic and business interests (Semmelweis effect), is unfortunately completely left out of Rommelfanger's considerations. This paper was published in Ordnung der Wissenschaft (OdW) Issue 4 in 2023.