Chemists charge JACS resisted error correction

Abstract

Two chemists charge that the peer-review system broke down and science's self-correcting mechanisms failed when the Journal of the American Chemical Society accepted papers with egregious errors and then initially refused to publish corrections. In a three-page account in the latest issue of Nature [359, 666 (1992)], Frederic M. Menger, professor of chemistry at Emory University, and Albert Haim, professor of chemistry at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, detail the rebuffs they experienced in their attempts to publish criticisms of papers by Columbia University chemistry professor Ronald C. Breslow. Breslow, however, asserts that his papers are fundamentally correct. The JACS editors embroiled in the controversy, meanwhile, maintain that Menger and Haim simply experienced the normal back-and-forth of peer review. They point out that both critics eventually had their comments on Breslow's work published— Menger's in The Journal of Organic Chemistry, and Haim's in the Oct. 21 issue of JACS. ...