ScienceInsider

A scandal appears to be brewing among French geologists and other earth scientists. According to a full-page story in the 26 December 2008 issue of the French daily Le Monde, members of the prestigious Institute of the Physics of the Globe of Paris (IPGP) stand accused of conflicts of interest. Their offenses? While serving on the seven-member editorial board of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, several IPGP researchers allegedly edited and accepted papers from colleagues at their own institute.

The affaire threatens to taint France’s former research minister, geophysicist Claude Allègre—also a former director of the IPGP—just at the moment when Allègre is reportedly being considered for a cabinet post. According to Le Monde, four of Allègre’s papers received such insider treatment; one published in 2004 was edited by IPGP geophysics researcher and current director Vincent Courtillot, a longtime Allègre associate who served as his chief advisor at the research ministry.

The conflict-of-interest accusations are circulating in the form of an anonymously produced 100-page document consisting largely of the papers concerned. According to Le Monde, the document was sent to the journal’s publisher, Friso Veenstra of the scientific publishing giant Elsevier. Veenstra reportedly told Le Monde that he had not been aware of the situation but that in the future he would keep IPGP members from serving on the main editorial committee—citing a formal rule the publisher had adopted in 2006 against such conflicts of interest.

But Courtillot, who reportedly served on the editorial committee from 2003 to 2005, and IPGP geochemist Claude Jaupart, a member from 2006 to 2008, are quoted by Le Monde as denying that there was any secret about their involvement with the IPGP papers, arguing that they were identified as the editors on each one. Courtillot and Jaupart also say that their role on the editorial committee was explicitly to help publish French papers that, despite their high quality, might not otherwise have seen the light of day.

Le Monde reports that the affair has embarrassed officials of the giant research agency CNRS, with which the IPGP is associated, citing e-mails that the paper has obtained. As for who took the trouble to dig out all of the offending papers and circulate the anonymous 100-page document of accusation, Le Monde says that this is an “open question”—but suggests that researchers unhappy about Allègre’s vocal skepticism of global warming being caused by human activities might have been involved.

—Michael Balter