The story begins in August, when a professor emeritus of molecular medicine at the University of Sydney published a critique of a paper that itself had critiqued the practice of circumcision.

In March, 2013, a graduate student joined the lab of a prominent researcher in Australia. A few months later, everything fell apart.

Another "oops."

An investigation included the last author, a prominent researcher who is also a vice president at another institution in Taiwan.

Oops.

If journals were to compensate those reviewers at a reasonable rate of $75 per hour, that’s on the order of $4.5 billion of labor.

Lots of good stuff here.

Someone illegally accessed a publisher workflow to add fake authors and manipulate text.

"On the other hand, weekend days (Saturday and Sunday) are not the best days to finalize and submit manuscripts."

A letter alleges the lab that produced the initial results turned other scientists away when they tried to replicate its findings in mammalian cells.

"Several poor and/or irresponsible research practices appear entrenched in Dr. Sarkar’s laboratory...'

Lack of ethical approval sinks study.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the companies that sell those meters objected to how the studies were conducted.

A comment on PubPeer says the paper contains several figures that were "inappropriately manipulated" by the first author.

"Beyond the time it takes to actually get the science done, peer review has become the slowest step in the process of sharing studies."