Ivan Oransky

Ivan Oransky is an American physician and journalist known for his advocacy of scientific integrity through tracking research misconduct and promoting institutional reforms in scientific publishing.^[1] His opinions and statistics on scientific misconduct have been described in the media.^[2][3][4][5]

Education and career

Oransky earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard College, where he served as executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He obtained his M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine. During medical school, he served as editor-in-chief of Pulse, the medical student section of the Journal of the American Medical Association.^[2][6][7][8]

Oransky has held senior editorial positions including deputy editor of The Scientist (2004-2008), managing editor for online content at Scientific American (2008-2009), executive editor of Reuters Health (2009-2013), vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today (2013-2017), and vice president of editorial at Medscape (2018-2020).^[9] From 2017 to 2021, he served as president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. He has also taught medical journalism at New York University since 2002 and previously taught at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism from 2007 to 2009.^[8][10]

Oransky co-founded Retraction Watch in 2010 with Adam Marcus, a blog and database tracking retractions in scientific literature. He serves as Distinguished Journalist in Residence at New York University's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute, where he teaches medical journalism in the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. Since 2020, he has been Editor-in-Chief of The Transmitter, a neuroscience publication by the Simons Foundation.^[11][12][8]

Awards

Oransky has received several recognitions for his work. In 2015, he received the John P. McGovern Award for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association.^[13] In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in civil laws from The University of the South (Sewanee).^[14] In 2019, he received a commendation from the judges of the John Maddox Prize for his work at Retraction Watch promoting those who stand up for science in the face of hostility.^[15][16]

Publications and public talks

In 2011, Oransky and Adam Marcus coauthored an article in Nature pointing out that the peer review process for scholarly publications continues long after the publication time.^[17] In 2014, Oransky coauthored an article in Nature that describes how several authors were caught reviewing their own papers.^[18]

In 2012, Oransky gave a talk at TEDMED titled 'Are we overmedicalized?' where he discussed the epidemic of medical 'preconditions' and warned against overtreatment in healthcare.^[19][20]

In 2018, Oransky and Marcus profiled in Science magazine two researchers whose investigative work to find inconsistencies in published data has been instrumental in catalyzing retractions.^[21]

In August 2023, Oransky and Marcus coauthored op-eds in Scientific American^[22] and The Guardian.^[23] In the wake of the resignation of Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Oransky and Marcus suggested that scientific misconduct is more common than is reported. They also assess that, despite recent scandals involving research misconduct, the academic community is uninterested in exposing wrongdoing and scientific errors, but that all members of the academic community are responsible for the delays and lack of action.