Journal reference: Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.006

In a statement, Cell has also denied that its review was conducted too quickly: “It is a misrepresentation to equate slow peer review with thoroughness or rigor or to use timely peer review as a justification for sloppiness in manuscript preparation.”

Both Cell and the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), which runs the primate centre, have issued statements describing the problems as “minor errors” made when the researchers put together the figures for the paper.

Just over a week ago, researchers led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton announced their success in achieving the feat. It was the culmination of a quest that had frustrated the field since 2005, when a previous claim to have produced cloned human stem cells, made by a team led by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University in South Korea, was shown to be fraudulent.

Typical problem

Simple duplications and mislabelling of images, while sloppy, do not usually result in findings of scientific misconduct. When New Scientist highlighted errors in papers from stem cell biologists at the University of Minnesota, the resulting inquiries did lead to a finding of misconduct, but only where the images seemed to have been altered to change their scientific meaning.

Additional photos and data are being sent to Cell to enable a correction to be made, says OHSU spokesperson Jim Newman: “Neither OHSU nor Cell editors believe these errors impact the scientific findings of the paper in any way. We also do not believe there was any wrongdoing.”

Now Mitalipov’s work is itself under scrutiny, after anonymous scientists noted online that his paper contains duplicated and mislabelled images and plots. “This is really like déjà vu all over again,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

That seems unlikely to defuse the controversy over how the paper was handled, however. Kriegstein argues that the lag between submission and acceptance was just too short to allow careful scrutiny of its contents. “This is exactly what happens when things are over-hasty,” he says. “It’s a shame that the journal didn’t slow it down.”

Time to verify

Newman says that Mitalipov had wanted the paper to appear before he presented the result at next month’s annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston, but adds that Mitalipov did not put any pressure on the journal to publish within days of submission.

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Cell, meanwhile, denies that it put unusual time pressure on the scientists who reviewed the paper. “Cell routinely asks reviewers to prioritise a timely turn-around on their reviews and in this case the reviewers moved it to the top of their to-do list and got back to us unusually quickly,” says journal spokesperson Mary Beth O’Leary.

A careful process

To be clear, no one is suggesting that Mitalipov’s group is guilty of fraud. But given that the paper was accepted for publication by the journal Cell within four days of being submitted, the incident is drawing attention to the errors that can occur when scientists and journals race to get exciting research findings into print.

In one example, a photograph of cells growing in culture is used twice, once labelled as being a cloned cell line, the other time showing regular human embryonic stem cells isolated from an IVF embryo. The errors were first highlighted on a website called PubPeer, which provides anonymous peer discussion of papers after publication.

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Newman adds that even before the errors were spotted, Mitalipov had already started distributing his cell lines to other researchers so that they could verify his findings. The key will be whether genetic analysis confirms that the cells really are clones of the donor cells used in the experiments.

“In my view, this is a typical problem when you rush something into press so quickly,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, UK.