Welsh Academic guilty of scientific fraud – a snake in the grass!
Media release dated May 2012
An academic at the University at Bangor, Mr. Wolfgang Wuster has been shown to have committed scientific fraud.
A paper published last month showed that Wuster as co-author with American Van Wallach and African-based Don Broadley in 2009 committed an act of fraud to attempt to steal naming rights for a genus of Cobras from an Australian zoologist, Raymond Hoser.
On 21 September 2009, Wuster and the associates published a paper in the journal Zootaxa “naming” a group of Cobras “Afronaja”. The major issue wasn’t that Hoser had already named the same animals as Spracklandus six months earlier, but rather the false and fraudulent claims made by Wuster and the others to justify their audacious move.
To justify their action, Wuster and others claimed that the Hoser journal, Australasian Journal of Herpetology had not been published in hard copy and was therefore invalid according to the Zoological Code. However, in writing co-author Wallach had earlier sent an e-mail to Hoser seeking hard copies of the said journal, meaning that at all materially relevant times, they were fully aware that the earlier journal had been validly published in hard copy.
Of greater significance was the misleading claim in their paper that they had done a global search for hard copies of the Hoser journal but been unable to find any.
That the alleged search results was fraudulent was shown by the fact that the men chose not to look in the one place that the Zoological Rules said hard copies should be sent to, namely Zoological Record and that they never sought a list from Hoser as to where copies were sent. The men made it clear in their publication that they had a copy of these rules and had read them.
Shortly after the fraudulent paper was published, Hoser contacted the authors and advised them their claims against his original paper was false and provided evidence in support of the fact. Wuster acknowledged receipt of this information but then continued to peddle the false claims.
Furthermore the men widened it to include several other Hoser papers, putting the stability of several scientific names in jeopardy.
Finally, more than two years later, Hoser retaliated by publishing the details of the scientific fraud by Wallach and the others. He did this in another paper in Australasian Journal of Herpetology issue 9.
Within the journal was copies of e-mails, library receipts and the like proving that not only had the original February 2009 paper by Hoser been validly published in hard copy, but more importantly that Wuster and the others were fully aware of this when they committed their fraud.
It also came to light that Wuster’s co-author, Wallach (the lead author in this paper) had engaged in a similar scientific fraud in 2006. On that occasion he tried to usurp naming rights on a genus of blind snakes. He then published a description of a genus “Austrotyplops” claiming that an earlier description of the same genus under the name of Sivadictus by Wells and Wellington in 1985 wasn’t valid as it lacked a diagnosis. But an inspection of the original description by Wells and Wellington (p. 41), yields an extensive diagnosis, showing that again Wallach had lied in a bid to improperly usurp someone else’s naming rights on a genus of snakes.
Fraudulent and dishonest conduct by people paid as scientists is rarely exposed, so this case should be widely disseminated and widely reported so as to act as a disincentive for other academics to engage in similar practices.
Australasian Journal of Herpetology Issue 9 can be obtained as either hard copy or online at:  http://www.herp.net