Image: GovernmentZA [CC BY-ND 2.0], via Flickr
Fellow South African scientists criticise Lee Berger’s conduct and call for community reflection
South African palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger has been accused of “exploiting” preprint publishing models to bypass scholarly peer review.
The accusation comes in an opinion piece published in the South African Journal of Science on 27 March by two other South African palaeo researchers. Berger (pictured, right) had not publicly responded to the allegation as of 3 April.
In their article, Robyn Pickering, an isotope geochemist based at the University of Cape Town, and Dipuo Kgotleng, director of the University of Johannesburg’s Palaeo-Research Institute, criticise how Berger and his team handled findings related to Homo naledi, a hominin discovered in the Rising Star cave system outside Johannesburg.
The controversial findings—which were featured in a Netflix documentary last year—assert that Homo naledi buried its dead and made art and stone tools.
Berger and his team described these findings in three manuscripts that were published as preprints on the BioRxiv server in June last year, having been submitted to the online journal eLife around a month earlier. The eLife journal sent the manuscripts for peer review, and the publication of the preprints in the meantime was done in accordance with eLife’s publishing model, the article says.
According to Pickering and Kgotleng, the publication of the preprints was followed by “huge, coordinated and thorough media coverage”.
Then, in July, a documentary titled Unknown: Cave of Bones aired on Netflix, outlining the discoveries. This arrived just a few days after 11 peer reviews of the three manuscripts were published on eLife. Ten of the reviews rejected Berger’s claims. In November, a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Human Evolution concluded that there was “no scientific evidence” that Homo naledi buried its dead or produced rock art.
‘Deliberate exploitation’
Central to Pickering and Kgotleng’s critique is that neither the Netflix documentary nor a book published in October mention that the findings were preliminary and subject to review. This, they say, runs counter to the spirit in which the preprint publishing system was introduced. Nor, they write, have Berger or his co-authors revised the original manuscripts to address the reviewers’ comments.
“This is not just a muddle of dates or a slip of the tongue at a stressful press interview by a media-shy academic. This appears to be a deliberate and well-planned exploitation of a new publishing model to shortcut the usual scientific process of academic publishing,” Pickering and Kgotleng write.
“Palaeoanthropology is not a field that needs urgent research and rapid breakthroughs. Given the huge and wide public interest in human evolution and our origins, this research field benefits from much slower, measured and careful research,” they say, adding that there is “no demonstrable need to peddle an unreviewed narrative to the public”.
Review process
The eLife journal, which introduced its new publishing model in January 2023, told Research Professional News that while preprints are important for accelerating science, it is committed to bringing peer review to readers so they can determine what is trustworthy.
“In this particular case, our review process highlighted various concerns with the findings, which were published as part of the papers so that anyone reading them would be aware of them,” Emily Packer, eLife media relations manager, said in a statement.
She added: “In an ideal world, the preprints and the reviews would have been shared with the media at the same time. While we do allow authors to share their preprints at any time under the terms of our media policy, when we are involved in preparing press releases we work to ensure that journalists and readers have access to the peer-reviewed articles and can therefore handle them as appropriate."
Call for introspection
In their article, Pickering and Kgotleng point to another much-criticised act by Berger, when he sought—and obtained—permission to launch hominin fossil bones into space on 8 September, a move critics branded a “publicity stunt”.
They urge the South African and broader palaeoscience community to reflect on the past year’s events and to ask itself whether this is what the community wants.
“We call on this community, as well as on the funders, heritage practitioners, permit-granting agencies and government research bodies, to take a long, hard look at human evolution research and its associated disciplines in 2023 and consider where we want to be in 2024 and beyond,” they write.
Research Professional News has approached Berger for comment.
This article was changed on 9 August to clarify that eLife’s new publishing model publishes reviewed preprints.