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It’s now been more than five months since Obokata et al. published the two “Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency” or ‘STAP cell’ papers in Nature that would cause such soul-searching in the scientific community. We first covered the controversy surrounding the papers, and how it was reflected in the recommendations and dissents for the first paper on F1000Prime, in our blog post back in March.

Since then, there have been myriad twists and turns in the story as various researchers, bloggers and writers refuted and counter-refuted the methodology and findings of these papers. We summarised the main story arc in our timeline of events in May, and were proud to announce that our sister journal, F1000Research, had become a major part of the story with the full and open publication of Ken Lee’s attempts to replicate the STAP studies (see also the F1000Research blog post and interview with Ken Lee for more about the paper).

As most will have already heard, the original STAP papers have now been retracted by Nature. As is our policy in these cases, a note from editorial has been added to the recommended paper’s page on F1000Prime, but with the original recommendations, user comments, dissents and withdrawals still published and available.

It is likely that this is not the last we shall hear on the subject. If nothing else, the affair has again underlined many of the ongoing issues surrounding science publishing in the information age; Nature itself has announced that it will be investigating its own policies following the retraction. The key role played by scientists sharing their replication results across the globe through the internet demonstrates that the level of scrutiny the aggregated efforts of the scientific community can bring to bear is a force to be reckoned with. STAP cells may have been consigned to the history books, but the case for open data never seemed stronger.