"Nature" becomes "Nature India", though partly

Shiva Ayyadurai's controversial Nature India article now is listed as Nature India, rather than Nature, as it was before.

S. Ayyadurai, Commentary: Innovation Demands Freedom, Nature India, December, 2009.

After public outrage on various Blogs including nanoplitan, it is heartening to see how the CV got back in shape, though after a big delay.

Incidentally, his resume on his own website www.vashiva.com reads otherwise.

S. Ayyadurai, Commentary: Innovation Demands Freedom, Nature, December, 2009.

Hope this Blog will open eyes and instigate Shiva to stop feeding misinformation.

Scientist writes Open Letter against Unethical practices by Deepak Sardana and Shiva Ayyadurai

Today, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Microbial Technology and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awardee, Dr GPS Raghava wrote an open mail to Deepak Sardana on the regular SPAM mails sent out by a group of people who call themselves "Freedom for Science"
http://www.wikio.co.uk/article/bhramachari-dg-csir-victimizes-csir-report-154756139

The entire letter is reproduced below:

Disturbing all scientist

I am one of senior scientist working in CSIR, I am getting continuos email from Deepak Sardana on behalf of Shiva. They never take my permission to enter my name in their mailing list, they have taken granted to send emails to CSIR scientists without taking their permission. This is against internet ethics, one can not advertise their propaganda via mailing list, without consent. I just ignore their previous emails because, I have lot of work to do. Today, I again got email with above content so I decided to respond as they are abusing CSIR system and intruding my privacy. Following is my response to above report

Dear Deepak
First place I am not convinced why CSIR hire you peoples. For me only reason for hiring Shiva was his experience in business. As far as science is concerned he is not even equivalent to good PhD student of India. My PhD student have better record of publication than Shiva. He is writing report he is a great scientist and know better than all CSIR scientists of India. I read report, it is nothing just obvious things, we all know weakness of CSIR system, it have number of reasons including poor salary of indian scientist in compare to their counter part in foreign country. The challenge is how to improve the system in given environment. Your duty was to improve system and improve it slowly using "leading by examples" instead of that you people started campaign against CSIR in order to defame it. If you read Shiva article in nature it is a childish report, their is no good idea except to abuse CSIR. One side you are abusing a system other side you expect that system will not fire you. Firing from job was obvious and you are expecting explanation from system. You people have no self respect, shiva should vacate his house immediately once he got fired from job. Instead he is abusing CSIR and wants to use facilities of CSIR, "What a shameless expectations". In world no univ/system/organization will allow a person to destroy the system itself where he/she is working. Why you expect CSIR should provide all facilities even your jobs were terminated. I think CSIR take right decision to remove you people, it is in favor of a system to remove a person as early as possible, who is destroying image of system.

Hire and fire is common all over the world but no body make political issue, if you people are not suitable for CSIR, why CSIR should keep you. One side you are claiming that you come to india to serve india other side you are crying like a frustrated struggler. You are expecting that CSIR scientist or DG CSIR should respond to Shiva queries in order to make him important. Regarding public debate see various blogs and debates and you will realize how great Shiva is, he is making wrong claims, changing his CV, boosting his contribution, including creation of confusing web pages http://stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/index.html .
No good scientist in world will support him, who understand science, as his contribution to science is negligible. You should understand he is on road after taking 4 degrees from MIT and in age of 45 years without making any significant contribution. I will advise you people to concentrate on your business and demonstrate your skill by doing something grate in western countries and prove your leadership skill. In life best way to lead public is by examples. Please forgive me if I am too rude, I write whatever I feel, these are my personal views.

With best wishes

Raghava

======================================================
# Dr G P S Raghava (FASc, FNASc), Head Bioinformatics Centre #
# Institute of Microbial Technology, Sector-39A, Chandigarh, India #
# Phone: +91-172-2690557, Fax: +91-172-2690632 #
# Eadd: http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/ raghava@imtech.res.in #
#=====================================================



Footnote #1:
The Freedom for Science Blog claims to have 4000 subscribers to its newsletter and hope by now we all know how they add subscribers.

Footnote #2:
It is no wonder that Sardhana cannot even spell DG CSIR's last name properly. Talks a lot of professionalism !!

Another Blogger on Nature's One sided story

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Note Dec 07/2009. We agree with Rahul on his comment. We have modified the Blog accordingly . Apologies on stating what you did not.

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E's flat writes a Blog trivialising the Shiva Ayyadurai episode and pointing fingers at the Nature.

Nature seems to be having a vested interest in propagating the Shiva version of the story.This is in perfectly in sync with what Insider has been talking for quite some time now and the rising allegations against Nature, Nature India's editor and Nature correspondent.

Excerpts from the Blog

...it seems Nature is intent on promoting Shiva Ayyadurai's version of the story and will brook no dissent

also

Also, from this post (see comment), it seems that the Nature editors (in London, not India) objected to personal accusations made in those and other posts. I wonder, then, why they agreed not only to publish, but to highlight, accusations made by Shiva Ayyadurai in his article (which continues, as I write, to be frontpaged in the Nature India website) -- accusations which include fraud, financial wrongdoing, and arson to cover up the wrongdoing.

Is Nature listening ?

Faculty webpage on students' website ?

This seems a bit unusual, but you can see it for yourself here at URL:  http://stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/index.html . If you think this is the faculty website, I wish to be the devil's advocate. Though the website has uncanny resemblance to the faculty webpages, complete with the top banner and links (see the People link which points to the original MIT faculty pages at http://web.mit.edu/be/people/index.htm) Even the faculty link on the left hand corner points to the right faculty webpage http://web.mit.edu/be/people/index.htm

You may wonder if this is fine, until you see what the stuff.mit.edu is all about. The website says at http://stuff.mit.edu/about.html

stuff.mit.edu is a student-maintained web server whose primary purpose is to provide a customizable homepage designed specifically with students in mind. It is run by the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Well there must be nothing particularly wrong with it, nor I am suggesting anything is amyss, I just said I want to be a devils' advocate.

Here are the reasons why

1) It is unusual for a faculty to put up a website on the students' community section (even when Ayyadurai himself had a student page in the same URL. How did I know ? from the Google cache http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:Pd4doM6Bxp0J:stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/index.html+http://stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=firefox-a


I also find that page now moved to http://stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/activities.html How did I find it ? MIT guys are just fantastic, they have a superfast search facility on stuff.mit.edu

2) The homepage has been changed recently , as recent as last week, since it also has the fraudulently claimed "Nature" Commentary.It also has a image of Shiva Ayyadurai in poor pixels, which is very familiar to all of us by now, from the controversial Nature India.

3) What would a schoolkid do if he were to sell his graduate student page as a faculty page ? Simply copy the page from somewhere and change the contents. Simple. So being the devil myself, I tried doing that, and if you do so, it would save all the content images in a folder named "index_files" by default.

4) So what ? Nothing great though, I just tried this one, http://stuff.mit.edu/people/vashiva/index_files/ . Well whats great ? Hmm, nothing much other than I know whose page it was copied from . It is http://web.mit.edu/be/people/stachowiak.htm . How did I know ? Simple dude ...  I find a file

stachowiak.jpg

02-Dec-2009 14:45

9.4K

Tells everything.

I rest my case . You decide...
(PS: I have screenshots and copies of everuthing, just for reference)

Nature India Editor should clarify on the Shiva Ayyadurai fiasco

We demand the Nature India Editor should come out and clarify on her role in the entire Shiva Ayyadurai fiasco.

The following are the events
1) Nature India publishes a one-sided version of the Shiva Ayyadurai story as a commentary. The Editor never wanted to publish the other side of the story nor wanted to even enquire what Shiva stated were true. She even tweeted this out at http://twitter.com/Subhrapr/status/6296242057 showing her involvement and interest in the entire event.


2) Nature India gags two Scientists' posts on the Nature Network Blog, even when they raised the issues with their names. If their allegations were not substantial, we do not think they would put their names at stake, while leaving the barrage of comments that followed untouched. Then why was the Shiva commentary on Nature India left untouched ? Were there no personal attacks on that article ?

3) Nature India Editor nor the copyrighters for Nature India have any issues with Shiva Ayyadurai who publicly republishes the entire article , with absolute disregard to copyrights. It has absolutely no issues with the commentary being fraudulently featured as from "nature.com" . Even after the Blogosphere erupted on the fraudulent behaviour of Shiva and the sudden change in the masthead following scathing remarks on the fraud on Nanopolitan, nature still seems to be mum about all this.

4) Posts against Nature India, Nature India Editor and Nature correspondent in India were unceremoniously removed from the "Freedom for Science" Blog, revealing the nexus between the Bloggers at the so-called "freedom of science" and Nature India Editors.

We demand an investigation into the unholy nexus between Nature India Editor and Shiva Ayyadurai and come out clean on the issue. If the Nature India Editors were professional journalists, it is unpardonable on their part to support "one" version of the story with absolute disregard to the "real" facts behind the episode. We smell a rat !!

No Free Lunches at Freedom for Science

If you thought "Freedom for Science" really meant what they said, you must be mistaken. The mouthpiece of the Shiva Ayyadurai team, today shamelessly deleted posts that were not in favour. The posts later appeared in Nanopolitan, another blog discussing the revelations by two CSIR scientists against Shiva Ayyadurai .

It is not a surprise that the so called "Freedom of Science" Blog is nothing but a farce and the intention is nothing but tarnish the image of Indian Scientists and CSIR Director General, Prof Samir Brahmachari in particular. This was a covert attempt to guard their backs while Shiva escapes the scrutiny of public for his misdeeds during his tenure as the CSIR tech head. Now that two named Scientists have come up against Shiva out in open, followed by the gag on the post by Nature India editors, it seems quite evident that there are many more players, probably also including the Nature India Editor in this entire scam.

Here is one of the Comment that got removed. Obvious that it pinched his "friends" in creating the entire drama.

Anonymous@Sunday, December 06, 2009 9:47:00 PM

Here is one of the comments that was removed from Freedom for science (Blog supporting Shiva):

The original blog at freedom for Science called for comments and support from Dr. Swapan Kumar Das. Here is what Dr. Das has to say on the Nature India episode as it appears in http://shiva-ayyadurai.blogspot.com/:

Now that the entire Ayyadurai Expose and V Patel commentary in nature Network has suddenly disappeared, it raises some interesting questions on the stand of Nature on this.

1) Is Nature India Editor hand-in glove with Shiva Ayyadurai and promoting this entire scam ? What is the incentive and what is the game-plan ?

2) Why is Nature India giving so much coverage and promotion, and selectively blacking out "real" facts from public. Is this what Nature India calls "professionalism" or "journalism" ?

3) What are the conditions in which an unsubstantiated and personal version of the story find its way to the Nature India website, and why are commentaries who tell the other side of the story summarily rejected ?
4)What is Nature Correspondent Jayaraman's stand on the Shiva Ayyadurai episode ? Now that Jayaraman has little words to write on anything significant in Indian Science, probably he should give way for somebody younger.

It seems that the whole plan of asking Dr. Swapan Kumar Das for support has back fired for Shiva.
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This comment appeared for over an hour on the Freedom for science blog site before it was removed. Removal of this comment from the Freedom for Scinece Blog demonstrates the degree of transparency adopted by people who preach such things. Good try guys!!

This also substantiates what we blogged in our earlier posts. There is an intricate link between the Shiva Ayyadurai team and editors of Nature India. we are waiting for more details of this entire "conspiracy"

Nature India's high handedness in Shiva Ayyadurai the center of discussions

Bloggers at Nanopolitan, and elsewhere have taken it up seriously, and there have been serious exchange of words in the comments section of the Blog.

While everybody seems to agree (even the Shiva Ayyadurai supporting Blog Freedom of Science) alleges a high-handednesss shown by Nature in gagging free speech, unforthcoming of an organisation like Nature. The allegations of sudden blackouts on the Blogs without any warning seems to be unpardonable in light of Bloggers alleging Nature India editor's active role in the entire scam.

For new readers, even after the entire bunch of journos smashed him left and right at the very press meeting Shiva Ayyadurai organised in Delhi (his colleague Deepak Sardana was a mute spectator of the entire event), Natur India editor has taken it up seriously and started a new wave of angered posts on the Blogosphere against Shiva Ayyadurai and the Nature India Editor.


It also led to new allegations by other Scientisst abroad like Dr Swapan Kumar Das who alleged his blog was taken off without appropriate reason from the Nature comments sometime back. This blogger had been witness to this and his allegations.

Some bloggers on Nanopolitan even alleged that Nature India is playing pawn to teh CIA and its cronies, and there have been talks of demonstrations and protests against Nature and multinational companies who have been tarnishing Indian Science and Scientists.