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Comment by smcin | Hacker News Reader

[tl;dr] US District Court dismisses Francesca Gino's controversial $25m defamation lawsuit against Harvard Business School and DataColada scientist-bloggers (Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons). The judge allowed Gino's breach of contract claim against Harvard to continue.

DataColada's legal defense (so far) was paid for by their own universities; there is also a $378K private GoFundMe organized by Simine Vazire [https://www.gofundme.com/f/uhbka-support-data-coladas-legal-...]. Yet apparently not a penny from the journals which Gino published in, or by HBS, or the funders of Gino's research.

(EDIT: this got upvoted, then suddenly multiply downvoted and flagged - why? I wrote it very carefully and double-checked every single statement. If anyone's quibbling the term "Francesca Gino's controversial $25m defamation lawsuit", that term was used by the MBA-watching blog https://poetsandquants.com/2024/09/12/judge-dismisses-france... )

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Do universities typically go to bat for their faculty? Presumably the blog investigation is not done with any direct university involvement.

I can't comment, but it's a truly bizarre spectacle to see research integrity being upheld by three public-minded researchers (one of them based in Spain) and a defense fund on GoFundMe organized by an Australian academic. The academic publishers didn't fund them and neither did the funders of the research. We need a discussion about frameworks to fund misconduct researchers (including related legal defense), also about pressures to publish irreproducible results with mediagenic, counterfactual findings.

The entity with the least incentive to fully investigate HBS is, paradoxically... HBS itself... because questions have been raised about multiple other coauthors, the reputational and financial consequences and wrongful termination claims look set to run for a decade. Some have conjectured that whenever the full facts are finally disclosed, this scandal will take out the reputation of Harvard in general (not just HBS, or Behavioral Economics as a field, or priming), or all the Ivies, at least for business-school.

The universities might've deemed it to be an important enough PR situation and low risk enough to do it.

Alternatively maybe they were obligated to back them up if the work was done in their official capacity as faculty?

I think you mean the universities of the Data Colada researchers, not the researchers accused of misconduct.

Sure, but if this were to become commonplace, you can see misconduct researchers becoming a target for big recurring legal defense bills, big enough to involve insurers, faculty funding, etc. Eventually we might a some landmark verdict like the Apple-vs-Samsung of misconduct/defamation trials.

I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a half-finished draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in a real journal.

https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/30/stephensons-alternat...

My institution completely brushed it off as a no problem, and said that it wasn't worth pursuing it at all.

It was very traumatising (and still is). I lost all faith in academia.

Do you have a source for their universities paying? Their fundraising page states that "their employers have so far only agreed to pay part of the legal fees".

https://www.gofundme.com/f/uhbka-support-data-coladas-legal-...

In the August 2nd, 2024 update on the GoFundMe:

"Because our universities have generously funded our defense up to this point, we have not (yet) had to use any of the GoFundMe money... we are reaching out to you to explain how we intend to use it. Obviously if we need the money for our defense, we will use it for our defense. Our plan is to donate any money we do not use to The Scientific Integrity Fund, an organization that defends scientists who find themselves in a predicament that is very similar to ours. "

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