Elisabeth Bik

[15] After receiving her doctorate, Bik worked for the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, where she organized the development of new molecular techniques for identifying infectious agents.

[23] She is also an active contributor to Retraction Watch[4] and PubPeer,[24] highlighting scientific papers that present falsified, duplicated, and questionable data, such as in western blot images.

"[32] In September 2021, Bik discovered repetitive elements in published images that indicated digital tampering by authors of a paper by the controversial Comet Research Group claiming the discovery of the Biblical Sodom, and evidence that it had been destroyed by a cosmic airburst.

[35] During a session of the 2022 European Hematology Association Congress, Bik presented information about artificial intelligence being used to fraudulently generate Western blot images.

[36] In March 2020, commenting on the publication of the results of a clinical trial by Didier Raoult on the effect of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, she identified a conflict of interest and strongly criticized the methodology of the study.

[37][38] The owners of the journal that had published the results admitted that the publication was not at the level expected by the society, in particular due to a lack of justification of the criteria for patient selection and triage.

[39] They then rebutted allegations of a conflict of interest, stating that the peer review process prior to publication had been respected because Jean-Marc Rolain, one of the co-authors of the article and editor of the journal, had not participated in the evaluation.

[40] In May 2021, the French non profit association Citizen4Science, made up of scientists and citizens, published a press release in response to an announcement by Didier Raoult's lawyer that IHU Marseille was suing Bik.

Citizen4Science linked a petition denouncing the harassment of scientists and defenders of science integrity, specifically mentioning Bik and calling on French authorities to intervene and journalists to look into the matter.

A scientific graph with three subtle image duplications.
Two examples of image duplications (highlighted) that were discovered by Elisabeth Bik in microbiology research publications. Different panels represent different experimental conditions. The source article states that these might have been “honest errors during assembly of the figures”, and that the relevant papers have been corrected.