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A few weeks ago we published Prof. Kenneth Lee and his research group’s attempt to replicate the now infamous STAP cell work published in January of this year. Ken’s groups article has proven to be very popular with the scientific community having received over 5000 views in its first two weeks of being online, and it has since been openly peer reviewed by two stem cell experts, Prof. Christine Mummery and Prof. Janet Rossant. The popularity of the article has come from the open science approach fostered by F1000Research; that is, fast publication without delay, completely open refereeing and commenting, and the availability of the study’s underlying data – a complete juxtaposition when compared to the original publications in Nature.

Professor Lee and his group have been subjected to a lot of media attention since they started their efforts to replicate the findings and have been on a quite a roller-coaster ride over the past few months. With this in mind, we wanted to interview Ken and his group and ask them some questions on how it’s been for them over this chaotic period, how they have embraced open science and indeed what is next for this talented research group.

Photo above – Professor Lee and his research group: Top Left: Henry Lee. Back row (from left to right) Wen Ting Shi, Tommy Lo, Yao Yao. Front row (from left to right) Kenneth Lee and Florence Tang.

Interview

F1000Research: Ken, you and the team have had quite a journey going from live blogging your experiments with a captivated following to formally publishing your work in a transparent, open science journal! Have you enjoyed making your findings publically available both on ResearchGate and now in F1000Research?

Ken: I believe it was probably the first time that an experiment had been live blogged, which is exciting in itself. At first, I thought very few people would be interested in my improvised blog and thought it would only appeal to the people that regularly frequent the Q&A section of ResearchGate. I was then informed by ResearchGate about the huge traffic it was receiving, so with them “beating the drum” and my (possibly naive) use of Twitter, we were able to build up a massive following worldwide.

This didn’t come without challenges. There was a great deal of pressure on us to get everything right because of the controversy surrounding the replication of the STAP experiments. I was very lucky to have an experienced team in place, and have access to the mice, reagents and the ethical approval needed to conduct the experiments rapidly. We tried to be as unbiased and open minded as possible when performing the experiments and analyzing the results as people’s reputation and careers were at stake. Blogging had its advantages as it enabled us to show the public how science is normally conducted behind closed doors. The drawback is that we could only provide a snapshot of the data every day rather than the complete picture which is essentially what everyone wants. By doing it this way we didn’t have time to think about the results carefully, which means you can potentially fall into the trap of making hasty conclusions – which I did on April Fool’s Day. Since then, my team has repeated the experiments several times and we have managed to validate our conclusions.

To give my hardworking students credit for their efforts and to mark the closure of our STAP experiments, we formally submitted our manuscript for publication. Publishing in F1000Research had its benefits and suited what we wanted achieve from publishing our results. We wanted to quickly make them available in the scientific literature so they could be easily accessed by our colleagues, but more importantly we wanted to publish it all in the open. We wanted to provide all of our data so that everyone could see and analyze it for themselves and we wanted the open peer review to generate ideas that could help enrich our understandings, and create a productive conversation about our work.

F1000Research: F1000Research has many features that more traditional journals don’t and so I was wondering how you found the whole process of publishing with us going from your initial submission to the open peer review you received?

Ken: F1000Research was really fast at making our manuscript public – the whole process took less than a week – which implies that scientific findings can be rapidly disseminated to the scientific community. This allows science to move ahead much faster which can only be a good thing. The open peer review process meant that the reviewers could not hide behind a veil of anonymity and have their comments kept confidential, and bearing in mind the controversial context of our article it was important to keep things open. The review process was more like having a productive online discussion rather than an ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’ from an editor. Open reviewing suited our needs, but as with all new approaches, the break from tradition may not be to the liking of some researchers; however I think it’s a step in the right direction. The comments section of F1000Research (both to the individual referee reports and the overall article) provide a potential second tier of referees which is great because with more eyes on our manuscript, any data missed by the selected reviewers can be easily identified and then addressed accordingly. Overall, we definitely enjoyed publishing in F1000Research and found it an enjoyable publishing experience which we would recommend to others.

F1000Research: I know that you have said you are not going to do any more STAP cell work, but do you intend to take your experiments any further with regards to the referee reviews you received and provide an updated version of the paper?

Ken: Yes, we will be conducting more experiments to generate the negative and positive controls as requested by the referees – both Christine and Janet make some excellent points which can only enhance the manuscript further. We will then submit a revised version of the paper to F1000Research as soon as the results are produced.

F1000Research: Do you think in light of what has happened with the closed peer review of the STAP papers published in Nature that a more transparent way of publishing is the way science should move forward?

Ken: Yes, I think the open peer review system is ultimately the way forward. The main thing for me is that it’s not just a select group of a few individuals looking at a paper; open peer review is more like providing a roundtable discussion where many experts have the chance to give their opinions. With more pairs of eyes on a piece of research, anything that is fraudulent, incorrect or unsubstantiated will be more easily identified and will help keep published work to a high standard. Open peer review will also encourage scientists to take more care in presenting their data and ensure they are accurate when preparing their methodologies. I understand that the STAP papers were reviewed many times before they were eventually published; wouldn’t it be interesting to see the referees’ comments for the revisions of these original articles and see how these revisions were done before being accepted and then published…

F1000Research: Finally, it has been well publicized that you and your group have tried to replicate the original STAP cell protocols, but this is obviously not your research interests on a day to day basis! Could you take the time to tell us a little more about the projects you are working on currently?

Ken: We do a lot more than replicate high profile papers! At the moment, half of the research team is heavily involved in producing libraries of small molecules so that they could be used to reprogramme somatic cells into stem cells and also be used for treating liver-associated diseases. My ultimate aim is to use a single small molecule to generate iPS cells and also a single small molecule to alleviate liver fibrosis. The other half of my team is investigating a gene named BRE and are trying to find out more about its role in skeletal muscle regeneration, cellular senescence and DNA repair. If anyone would like to know more then please feel free to contact me.