Another data scrape from academia

Found the ethics statement for the journal;

'Publication Ethics

Authors should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics. Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors’ own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are all unacceptable practices. Any cases of ethical misconduct are treated very seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines. All research employing human subjects must have been conducted with the authorization and approval of an Institutional Review Board, an Ethical Review Board, or some other credentialed research ethics committee.
Members of the journal’s editorial team (including assistant editors and editorial board members) are welcome to submit papers to BATS. These submissions are not given any priority over other manuscripts, and editorial team members’ affiliation with the journal has no bearing on editorial decisions. If an editorial team member is an author on a submission, they will have no involvement in or access to confidential information on the editorial process.'

https://bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org/guidelines/

Archived:

archive.ph/e0u3Z

AoIR: https://archive.ph/uAzua

The article is defamatory of Mumsnet, and users. throughout.

Scraping is against the T&Cs.

The journal is affiliated with Northwestern University Libraries as the publisher, the primary sponsoring organisation is the Center for Applied Transgender Studies

I don't see anything at all about ethics, but MN may wish to ask for a statement about ethics approval, data handling and anonymisation.

Internet-mediated research has domain-specific ethical expectations (AoIR, ESRC, UKRIO). If the authors failed to obtain required ethics approval, failed to mitigate harms to vulnerable people, or used deceptive methods without justification, the university (if they are employed there or used its resources) could face internal complaints for research misconduct.

I'm sure MN's lawyers are expert on this by now, but you may want to:

Request an investigation under the university’s research-integrity rules (missing ethics approval, failure to follow AoIR/ESRC guidance).

Complain to the publisher / journal: ask for corrections, clarifications, or retraction if procedures or ethics statements were inadequate.

'Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the special issue editors as well as our anonymized reviewers who provided insightful and crucial feedback. They also extend thanks to the panelists and attendees at the 2024 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Sheffield, who discussed this work with us. Finally, they extend love and gratitude to their friends, pets, and partners, who supported them through a deeply challenging research project.'

From the footnotes:

'“TIF” and “TIM” were banned across Mumsnet by founder Justine Roberts along with the terms “cis” and “TERF” as “many feminists are affronted by” the terms (Roberts 2018). These changes were aimed at encouraging “civil debate,” exemplifying the apolitical posturing that gives lip service to free speech and open debate while allowing Mumsnet leadership to abdicate responsibility for their culpability in fostering transphobia.↩︎'

I'm copy pasting this from @AstonUniversityDataScrapingDepartment:

'I have read it. I would be interested to see the peer reviews. (In my discipline these are also published.)
I would also be interested to see evidence of the editorial decision making process, not least evidence (or not) of due diligence wrt data use. It wouldn't take anyone long to see that (1) this kind of scraping is against T&Cs and (2) that MN is prepared to take legal action.
Finally, I hope MN looks at the "data availability statement" in which the authors of this article offer to give their scraped data to others.'