New Questions Bubbling Up Around Willie Soon's Disclosure Failures In Multiple Papers
A half-dozen academic journals are investigating allegations that aerospace engineer Willie Wei-Hock Soon, a prominent skeptic of the idea that humans are contributing to global warming, failed to disclose financial ties to a fossil fuel company in papers they published. And the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is examining fresh allegations—made in a report released today by the advocacy group Climate Investigations Center (CIC)—that Soon failed to follow disclosure rules in submitting a letter to that journal. The group has also raised questions about whether Soon followed disclosure policies in publishing recent papers in several other journals, including Nature Geoscience.
Today’s CIC report is a follow-on to documents released this past February by the Alexandria, Virginia–based nonprofit and the environmental group Greenpeace that attracted widespread media attention. The groups used a federal law that promotes transparency to obtain the documents from Soon’s employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which detailed some of his funding sources. They include the Southern Co., a large energy concern that has opposed government action on climate change. The documents also showed that Soon had characterized a number of his technical publications as “deliverables” to Southern under a funding agreement with the company. In a statement at the time, Soon said he violated no rules, but the documents prompted the CfA and the Smithsonian Institution to open investigations into the matter.
CIC and Greenpeace also wrote letters to eight science journals and one law journal, noting that those papers did not disclose Soon’s financial ties to Southern. In each case, the groups asked whether the journal had policies requiring disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
Today’s report describes how the journals have responded—and raises new questions about papers that Soon has published since 2012.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2015/06/journals-investigate-climate-skeptic-author-s-ties-fossil-fuel-firm-new
