Frontiers Pulls Special COVID-19 Issue After Content Dispute

The issue’s guest editors resign after falling out with the publisher over the management of papers, including a rejected manuscript on ivermectin, that were submitted for a special issue on drug repurposing for COVID-19.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Update (February 11): The American Journal of Therapeutics has issued expressions of concern on two published papers summarizing ivermectin’s use in COVID-19 patients. One of those papers was a reworked version of the manuscript by Pierre Kory and colleagues that had previously been rejected by Frontiers after editors determined that it contained “a series of strong, unsupported claims.” The other paper was authored by a separate research group. Both expressions of concern cite “allegations of inaccurate data collection and/or reporting” in at least one of the studies included in the reviews. The journal’s editor-in-chief, Peter Manu, tells Retraction Watch that any further action will hinge on the results of independent investigations at other institutions into those allegations.

A special issue of Frontiers in Pharmacology on repurposing existing drugs as COVID-19 treatments has been axed following a dispute between the journal’s publisher and the issue’s guest editors ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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