According to the number of emails we received (although the forum is rather quiet), the « Scientific Red Cards » project seems to foster interest and curiosity. However, as you may have noticed, the web site is still a beta version. Indeed, we are currently figuring out some details such as the legal framework in which we want to carry on this initiative. But that's not all, and here comes the part where we ask for your advice...

Up to now, our database gathers only 30 articles for which a scientific misconduct has been assessed by ad hoc committees. It's a fairly low amount but still enough to raise some critics about the approach. One of them concerns the visibility given to the author names: can we associate their names with “misconduct” knowing that, as long as the authors haven't been convinced of culpability in front of a legal committee (and not merely an investigation committee appointed by a university), they are truly considered as innocent? This presumption of innocence is one of the most important basis of any modern legal system to which we adhere completely. And it is clear that we don't aim at judging anyone but rather at pinpointing articles, that is focusing on published pieces of research rather than on the researcher themselves.
Then, the issue of the visibility of the authors’ names is also accompanied by the risk inherent in the usage of computer-based databases compared to the traditional means of listing and archiving. Indeed, nowadays, it becomes much easier to link data via the internet, for instance to search for a given author within the cases database, and to draw erroneous conclusions.
Thus two possibilities exist: (i) we keep the name of the authors but without any hypertext link which would force the reader who wants to know more to do the search by himself; (ii) we don't display the name of the authors anymore and keep only the title of the article.
However, here lies a misunderstanding: this web site displays only cases of misconduct that are already available on the web but at different places. Hence, the curious reader, be him a student, a colleague or a NIH administrative, will still be able to google the title of the article to retrieve the name of the authors. On the other hand, we all know how painful it is to be forced to open multiple tabs to google something, only because there is no hypertext link.

On this small yet revelatory issue, we ask for your input and would be happy to take any advice into consideration.