About For Better Science and Contact

For Better Science is a project, founded and edited since 2015 by Leonid Schneider. It is a crowd-sourced project supported with readers’ donations and run with the help of an international team of research integrity experts, several of whom are active contributors/writers for this website.

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About Leonid Schneider:

I am an independent science journalist, with around 13 years of biomedical research experience in molecular cell biology, stem cells and cancer research.

The usual science journalism restricts itself to repeating after the cues given by scientific elite and leading research institutions. What we mostly read in the science news, is the voice of power and money. The climate of fear is omnipresent in science: bad science is very rarely exposed in the open, fraud and ethics breach are routinely covered up, while accusations and criticisms are raised only behind closed doors and are often unfairly or even wrongfully assigned. There are many good and honest scientists out there, but they have no voice. My site is for them.

Therefore, one goal of my site is to give voice to such concerned scientists who would normally never dare to speak out their critique, for fear of their influential colleagues. Some of these voices are named, some names are confidential. You can be one of them, just contact me below.

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Email Leonid Schneider

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My conference presentations are available for you to browse and re-use at Slideshare. Some of my seminars are available as videos on YouTube. My academic CV and original research publications are listed on ORCID. Finally, I am also a cartoonist, the cartoons on this website are all mine, licenced CC-BY-NC-ND.

I welcome your opinions, suggestions and stories for my future journalistic investigations. Confidentiality guaranteed! Please leave a functional email address where I can reach you, if you want me to follow up on information you share.

Yours, Leonid Schneider

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For Better Science Contributors:

Smut Clyde

Smut Clyde is a pseudonym, held by a Hyperbolic Tangent Distributed Observer from New Zealand. He is a prolific PubPeer commenter and a supernatural image duplication detector. His specialities are papermill investigations, nanotechnology, beer, art history and various forms of quack science.

You can find Smut’s For Better Science articles here. He also has his own blog, Riddled, some cats, and a Twitter account.

As for Smut’s real identity: there are only wild speculations, like here.

Aneurus Inconstans

Aneurus Inconstans is also a pseudonym, referencing the randomly attributed PubPeer identity of this image integrity expert. His speciality is plant sciences, but not only.

You can find Aneurus’ For Better Science work and articles here.

Maarten van Kampen

Maarten van Kampen is the real name of a Dutch physicist. His speciality is physics and materials science.

You can find Maarten’s For Better Science work and articles here.

Alexander Magazinov

Alexander Magazinov is the real name of a russian mathematician who had to flee his country. His specialities are papermills, tortured phrases, bought authorships and citations, and of course, bad mathematics.

You can find Alexander’s For Better Science work and articles here.

Patricia Murray

Patricia Murray is Professor of Stem Cell Biology at the University of Liverpool, UK, and ex-nurse. Her interests are in ethics and integrity in medicine.

You can find Prof Murray’s For Better Science articles here (since they were submitted by email, L. Schneider is the nominal author). She is also active on Twitter.

Cheshire

Cheshire is again a pseudonym, of someone who is not even a scientist, but is very good in finding fake science. Cheshire comments on PubPeer as Actinopolyspora biskrensis. His speciality is biomedicine, only because there are many pictures to look at there.

You can find Cheshire’s For Better Science work and articles here. He is also active on Twitter.

Parashorea tomentella

Parashorea tomentella is another PubPeer-derived pseudonym, of a sleuth specialising on bad science and papermills in China. One of their biggest achievements was to flag over 6000 suspect papermill publications in Hindawi. You can find Parashorea’s For Better Science articles here.

Sholto David

Sholto David (his real name!) is a British sleuth, trained biologist, and maker of amazing videos (see YouTube channel AddictedToIgnorance). His speciality is image manipulation in biomedical papers. You can find Sholto’s For Better Science articles here.

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Next to myself and the regular writers above, there are also several one-time contributors, find them here in Guest Posts. You can be one of them!

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Contact Us

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PS by LS: those of my “special” readers, who aren’t interested in talking to me, but rather in engaging lawyers and German courts to stop my reporting, can save time searching for my residence address (Landungsanschrift): Taunusstr. 11, 63526 Erlensee, Germany

PPS by LS: You can also find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram, and you may recall I once was on Twitter, where I was permanently banned, as Twitter explained for “inciting other people to engage in the targeted harassment of” Eric Chabriere.