In the latest attack on the climate science community, John Mashey (a computer scientist and frequent DeSmogBlog contributor) was sued for $2 million for exposing plagiarism. It's a long and weird story, culminating with the two litigants who filed the suit dropping it just days before the first court date.
Even though the case was dropped, the legal fees still amounted to $15,000. Thankfully, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (which has a fairly succinct description of the events) covered Mashey's costs.
As for the details, Mashey himself has a more comprehensive account, but fair warning, this rabbit hole is deep, dark and scary:
In 2006, Congressman Joe Barton of Texas commissioned Edward Wegman—a statistician turned climate science critic—to investigate Michael Mann's hockey stick graph. The final product, known as the Wegman Report, was rife with problems. The blogger, Deep Climate, identified substantial plagiarism, upon which John Mashey reported in 2010.
But the story doesn't end there. Deep Climate and others further identified plagiarism in two papers that Wegman and his protege Yasmin Said (hereafter referred to as W&S) published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics (WIREs CS)—a journal the pair founded and for which they served as editors-in-chief. Mashey brought the complaint to Wiley's publisher, who proceeded to stonewall. Then, Wiley allowed W&S to rewrite their papers after publication and peer review, a very unusual breach of academic protocol. Mashey and others reported that to the Wiley Board and executives, but again were stonewalled.
Not too long after (June 2012), W&S quietly left their editor-in-chief roles at WIREs CS.
In 2014, W&S began assembling the documents necessary for suing Mashey for "tortious interference with contract" and "conspiracy," asking for $2 million in damages for having lost their Wiley editorships, which they blamed on Mashey's reporting on the Wegman Report and not the more recent and relevant papers. Even here they failed to follow protocol by not informing the defendant of the proceedings until a year after they had started filing subpoenas. Seemingly, W&S were hoping to catch Mashey off-guard—which they apparently still failed to do, because Mashey's body of work suggests he lives in a giant filing cabinet with a wealth of information at his fingertips.
Finally, in April of this year, W&S voluntarily dismissed the case before the first court date, leaving Mashey with $15,000 in legal costs for daring to report on plagiarism (again, those costs were covered by CSLDF). Even though W&S dropped the case, there remains the possibility of refiling, so this may not even be the bottom of the Wegman rabbit hole.
But for now, at least, it seems Mashey is safe from the outrageous $2 million claim sought by W&S.
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