It's completely false that "only the original researcher can request" a retraction. Completely untrue, and ridiculous.

No, that is clearly not what "Dr. Z." is expressing. He mentioned Regnerus facing a "jury of his peers," a topic completely separate from a court's consideration of Regnerus's viability as a supposed expert witness. Look to what happened to Walter Schumm in the Florida adoption case to see what could happen to Regnerus in Michigan.

Wright's superior at Elsevier is Ilaria Meliconi, who gave a deposition in support of Elsevier's motion to stay the judge's order that documentation be released. Meliconi should be considered an arch enemy of the LGBT community worldwide. Although retraction would not completely stop bigots from using the Marks and Regnerus papers as an anti-gay cudgel, it nonetheless would be helpful. Elsevier's Meliconi is working against retraction, and that is to say, she is abetting political gay bashers in countries as far-flung as Russia, Belize and Nigeria to use the anti-gay junk science Wright published, against LGBTers.

Wright is documented as having knowingly published lies from Regnerus in Regnerus's second NFSS paper in the November, 2012 issue of Social Science Research. His unethical behavior in doing that occurred at the University of Central Florida campus, where the UCF Creed supposedly applies to both faculty and students. Ergo, the UCF board of trustees, UCF President John Hitt and Provost Tony Woldrop also should be held accountable for the political gay bashing that Wright enabled by publishing anti-gay junk science from Marks, Regnerus, and others including Walter Schumm. University officials have failed in their duty to uphold their own school's Creed, its academic honor code, in the face of a faculty member documented as having violated it, at the expense of the LGBT community worldwide.

When concern was first expressed about Wright's integrity in publishing the Regnerus and Marks papers and the associated commentaries, all from non-experts with conflicts of interest, Wright announced that board member Darren Sherkat would conduct an "audit" of the publication of the Marks and Regnerus papers.

The fix on the audit was in, with it being agreed ahead of time between Elsevier, Wright and Sherkat that no matter what unethical deeds were discovered, Wright would not be held accountable for having knowingly published anti-gay junk science by subverting peer review ethics.

Sherkat lied in the audit by saying that Wright had told him the names of six peer reviewers between the Regnerus and Marks papers but not who had peer reviewed which paper. Meanwhile though, the whole point of learning the peer reviewers names to audit publication of the papers would be to check for conflicts of interest that the peer reviewers might have with either the funders or the researcher. So, where Sherkat wrote in his audit that he was not told who peer reviewed which paper, that would be an admission that he did not properly check for conflicts of interest.

However, he did know who peer reviewed which paper, as he confessed during a lecture at Fresno State. In his audit, he wrote "Scholars who should have known better failed to recuse themselves from peer review." And, after I smoked out Witherspoon Institute Program Director Brad Wilcox as a peer reviewer, Sherkat nonetheless alleged verbally to the public that the peer reviewers' conflicts of interest with Regnerus and his funders were "minimal," a falsehood.

Elsevier, the company, went beyond Wright's shamelessness in publishing Sherkat's audit, by saying that they reviewed the situation and nothing in it was irregular.

Mind you, previously, Elsevier has permitted pharmaceutical companies to put out entire "vanity" publication under the false guise that they were Elsevier scientific journals.

And, one of the excuses that Sherkat gives in the audit for why, for the peer review, Wright didn't use LGBT topic experts without conflicts of interest with Regnerus and his anti-gay funders was that Wright is so hugely overburdened with his work for the journal that he can barely keep up. Wright in an editor's letter that he published in November, 2012 made that same claim.

But when Wright was first deposed in Becker's case against UCF, and he and Elsevier were hoping to convince the court that the Regnerus-related documentation Becker is requesting should not be released, Wright's strategy changed. The less of an interdependence that could be established between Elsevier's journal "Social Science Research" (which is housed in UCF's Sociology Department) and the publicly funded UCF, the less compelling legal argument there would be for release of the Regnerus documentation Becker is requesting. Or so Elsevier and Wright hoped.

So, in his deposition, Wright alleged that on average, he spends three to four hours per week working for the journal. Got that? Regnerus editor James Wright in an audit and also in a letter he published claimed that he is so hugely burdened with his work for the journal that he didn't have time to find peer reviewers for the Marks and Regnerus papers who were both gay parenting topic experts and had no conflicts of interest. Yet, when it suited his (lying) purposes better, all of a sudden instead of being hugely busy with the journal, he only works three to four hours per week on it!

When a reporter makes a Freedom of Information Act request, he/she has to be narrow and specific in order to get what he/she is after, i.e. you don't ask for everything Wright wrote in 2013, you narrow it down so that you getting his communications with people known to have been involved in the Regnerus scandal. And, not everything a reporter would ask for in a request of narrow scope would be subject to disclosure. The reason I'm mentioning all of this is that obviously at this point, with so much damning documentation already had in the Regnerus hoax, the remaining documentation that UCF and Elsevier are desperately trying to prevent from being released includes documentation extremely incriminating of many of the bad faith actors in the Regnerus hoax. Were it not incriminating, they would have no motive for fighting against it being released.

Your reasoning is all off, as science publishing mainly is self-policing and not subject to legal actions. I have no idea why you are making a comment arguing against the judgment of the President of the American Sociological Association that the Regnerus paper must be retracted in order for the journal "Social Science Research" to begin to regain intellectual integrity.

Excuse me but you do not know enough of the existing documentation in this matter. You keep supposing there are holes where there are no holes. I alert other readers to the fact that the President of the American Sociological Association was among the many signers of a May, 2013 letter to Wright, and another, separate letter to the SSR Editorial Board, detailing why the Regnerus paper must be retracted if Social Science Research journal is to begin to restore its integrity, That May, 2013 letter is a different document from the June 2012 letter sent to Wright and signed by over 200 Ph.D.s and M.Ds.

Recent Freedom of Information Act documents have revealed a variety of issues with Regnerus’s study and your publication’s role in validating it as scientific research. In particular, according to a recent article in the Huffington Post,*

"(t)he documents, recently obtained through public-records requests by The American Independent and published in collaboration with The Huffington Post, show that the Witherspoon Institute recruited a professor from a major university to carry out a study that was designed to manipulate public policy. In communicating with donors about the research project, Witherspoon’s president clearly expected results unfavorable to the gay-marriage movement."

That professor was, of course, Mark Regnerus.

The following email from Witherspoon co-founder Luis Tellez, dated April 5, 2011, to a potential funder of Regnerus’s work, ought to be enough to convince you that the research was severely compromised by a political agenda to influence the Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions regarding Proposition 8 and DOMA:

"As you know, the future of the institution of marriage at this moment is very uncertain. It is essential that the necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society. That is what the NFSS is designed to do. Our first goal is to seek the truth, whatever that may turn out to be. Nevertheless, we are confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study as long as it is done honestly and well."

Tellez also wrote

"It would be great to have this before major decisions of the Supreme Court but that is secondary to the need to do this and do it well… I would like you to take ownership and think of how you want it done… rather than someone like me dictating parameters… but of course, here to help.” [ellipses in original]"

This indicates a direct relationship between a funder with a clear political agenda, a clear expected outcome for the research, and the researcher himself.

Additional documents shed light on Professor W. Bradford Wilcox’s role in the study and his affiliation with the Witherspoon Institute. Wilcox was hired by UT to assist Regnerus with the data analysis and was simultaneously the director of Witherspoon’s Program on Family, Marriage and Democracy. The fact that Wilcox sits on the editorial board of your journal makes the issues surrounding this publication without revision, before the data was fully collected, and in a three-week turn around, even more suspect. The further revelation that two of the three reviewers were part of the New Family Structure Survey is also troubling. Despite being a clear conflict of interest, Wright allowed these reviewers to consider the validity of Regnerus’s paper that was itself reliant on this very study for its claims. For the integrity of your journal’s peer review process, the article must be retracted.

Finally, the publication of the first scholarly analysis of the New Family Structures Survey shows serious and substantive flaws. Had your review process worked, it would have caught these flaws and required substantive revisions of the original paper. The analysis, by Andrew J. Perrin, Philip N. Cohen and Neal Caren, will be published by Gay and Lesbian Mental Health and was properly reviewed. (A preprint of it can be found at the link below **) It is clear from this analysis that there were serious mistakes in the data collection and data analysis, and Regnerus did not measure what he claims. In the conclusion of the Perrin et al. article, the authors state,

“Regnerus (2012a) fails to demonstrate that children from same-sex families display disadvantages.”

As you know, a similar conclusion was reached by the American Sociological Association, which filed in an amicus brief to the Hollingsworth v. Perry case, a case that also admitted Regnerus’s study as scientifically valid because your journal has refused to retract it.

It is the understanding of this group of social scientists that had your journal taken the usual professional care and time to consider the Regnerus article, the article would not have seen the light of day in its current form. It was an error on the part of your journal to rush the publication, an error that can only be corrected by retracting the article. We urge you to convince your editor, James Wright, to do just that. If he refuses, we would hope that you will ask for his resignation as editor since his publication of the article has put the reputation of your journal at risk.

I think you're commenting in good faith but not in control of all the evidence. Separately from the June 2012 letter signed by over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s to Regnerus's editor Wright expressing concern over the intellectual integrity of the Marks and Regnerus papers as well as of the process through which they were published, a letter was sent to Wright in May 2013, and signed by many leading scholars, calling for retraction of the Regnerus paper. Among the signers of that letter calling for retraction was Dr. Cecilia Ridgeway, President of the American Sociological Association. Here is the text of that letter:

We are a group of sociologists who are writing to ask you to work with the rest of the SSR Board to retract the publication of Mark Regnerus’s “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Survey,” July 2012. We appreciate the internal review your journal conducted last year, but recent documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as the first peer-reviewed article detailing the scientific flaws of the study indicate that this article should never have been published without serious revisions and thus should be retracted. Without retraction, the reputation of your journal and the integrity of the peer review process will certainly be diminished.

From this link: http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/...

Taking for granted the unethical behavior of Regnerus, and Brad Wilcox, on whose behalf Regnerus acted, the real failure here is by Wright. Instead of seriously reviewing the paper, he essentially whispered into an echo chamber of backers and consultants, “We should publish this, right?”

I believe the paper should be retracted because the conclusions are demonstrably wrong, because the author lied in the paper about the involvement of the institute that funded it, and because the peer review process was compromised by conflicts of interest. As long as this remains uncorrected, and James Wright remains editor, the integrity of the journal is indelibly tarnished.

While Wright is editor, I will no longer review for or submit to Social Science Research. I hope others will join me in that decision.

It's interesting that you raise the topic of the IRB. All a university IRB does is to verify that the individual study subjects' rights will be protected. In the case of a survey study like Regnerus's, really as there is no human contact all the IRB has to do is make sure that the survey administrators -- in this case, Knowledge Networks -- take adequate precautions to protect the respondents' privacy and anonymity.

Regnerus lied to the public by saying that UT's IRB approved of his study design (as though that meant that UT's IRB found that his study design was methodologically sound). If you look at his quotes on the topic of UT's IRB's approval of his plan, you will see that Regnerus was deliberately trying to mislead the public about what the IRB does.