The university reported this on its website last Wednesday.

Last November, the Committee for Academic Integrity published an investigation report which revealed that former Leiden psychologist Lorenza Colzato had committed fraud in at least fifteen publications. In 2019, it had already come to light that she had committed fraud in two other articles.

The university gave the journals six months to retract the articles. This deadline has now expired and ‘in the interest of academic integrity’, the university has decided to disclose the titles of the seven publications about which there is no doubt that malpractice has occurred. The names of the authors have been revealed as well. The Board hopes that disclosing the ‘titles of the malpractice articles with full references will provide clarity for the academic community, so that the integrity of the other articles will not be in question’.

Another reason why the Board has chosen to disclose the titles is because it is in the interest of ‘the young researchers who, as whistle-blowers, brought these breaches of academic integrity to light at the time’. According to the Board, they ‘also have a strong interest in gaining clarity about which articles in scientific journals are or are not tainted’.

The Board had previously held the view that the researchers involved in the fraudulent publications needed to be protected. Because of this, the titles of the publications were kept anonymous. ‘If we reveal those articles now, a large number of authors and employees will be placed under public suspicion of possibly being guilty of the fraud’, the Board told Mare in February.

This led to criticism from, among others, the Chairman of the Committee for Academic Integrity, Frits Rosendaal and the investigation committees who investigated the fraud committed by Diederik Stapel. They told Mare that science could only be corrected swiftly if the titles of the publications were made public. Paul Wouters, Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, who compared the redacted report to ‘a Secret Service report’, shared this view.

In April, Rector Hester Bijl changed her stance on the matter: during the University Council meeting she said that the university would disclose the titles of the tainted publications itself, should the journals fail to take action within six months.

In addition, the Committee for Academic Integrity decided to re-evaluate five of the articles upon ‘receiving reports’. The reassessment showed that one of the articles was wrongly designated as fraudulent. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to retract the article. For another article, it was found that ‘the breach of academic integrity is more serious in nature’ than had previously been established. The conclusions for the three other articles remain unchanged.

The reassessment was presumably initiated after whistle-blowers Laura Steenbergen and Roberta Sellaro pointed out several incorrect conclusions in the Committee’s report. Steenbergen: ‘When Roberta and I read the investigation report in November, we suspected that there were some inaccuracies. The report contained conclusions that raised questions in our minds: how did they arrive at these findings?’

She gives a few examples. ‘The Committee’s investigation report shows that in one of the publications, two test subjects were excluded. The journal that had published it asked us to check whether that was true. However, we couldn’t reproduce this conclusion; we found that five test subjects had been excluded.’

According to Steenbergen, there are more examples of incorrect conclusion in the report. ‘In the majority of the publications, there are more errors than stated in the report or the error lies in something other than what was reported. There is even one instance where the report states that something is wrong, when in reality, that isn’t the case at all.’

The two of them reported this to Philip Spinhoven, who was the scientific director of the Institute of Psychology at the time the fraud was committed and the main reporter of the fraud. The Executive Board subsequently instructed the Committee for Academic Integrity to carry out a reassessment.

Steenbergen does not know whether any other reports were made in addition to their own.