Thread by @janrosenow

An academic paper funded by the gas industry published in a mediocre journal recommends blending hydrogen into gas grid for heating.

A public records request reveals: Some of the study’s recommendations were substantially written by a gas lobbyist.

🧵

bostonglobe.com/2022/11/16/sci…

1/ Here's what the evidence not funded by any industry interests says about hydrogen for heating. I published a meta-review of all independent existing studies I could find in September.

https://twitter.com/janrosenow/status/1574776025879175168

2/ The paper "The viability of implementing hydrogen in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts" would have been excluded in my review because it did receive industry funding. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

3/ This is what the paper states where funding came from.

4/ The Boston Globe has found out: hundreds of pages of documents obtained by a public records request reveal that the authors knew that the funds had been solicited directly from some of the foundation’s members in the natural gas and pipeline industry.

5/ The authors state in the paper that there is no conflict of interests.

6/ Emails sent among the study’s principals and their funders reveal that specialists at a gas grid company and a business lobbyist with ties to the industry were allowed to review and suggest changes before the study was released.

7/ And some of the study’s recommendations were substantially written by the lobbyist. This is not just a conflict of interest but misleading as the lobbyist is not listed as an author of the paper.

8/ I agree with @howarth_cornell who said:

"My personal take is this should not have been published in a peer reviewed journal as it is, because I think the presentation is biased, slanted, and misleading in a way that’s hard to defend academically."

9/ Frontiers in Energy Research is part of Frontiers Media. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher.

10/ "Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts" and the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers." Source is: "Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy against Science"

11/ In 2017, editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high. In December 2017, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.

12/ Why does this matter? It means that the paper has not undergone the usual scrutiny of a peer-review process published in a journal that seems to publish almost anything submitted.

@MLiebreich @AukeHoekstra reminds me of #astongate

13/ That is the reason that I publish in reputable journals such as Nature Energy, Joule, RSER, Energy Policy etc. - you get 3 or more people to scrutinise your paper and often they will reject it.