The Lewandowsky affair shows no signs of dying down. Following Frontiers' decision to kill off the 'Recursive Fury' paper once and for all, Lewandowsky has responded by setting out his thoughts in a post at his own blog.
In this version of events the original retraction notice was agreed between the legal teams of Frontiers and the authors (is it normal to get the lawyers involved for this kind of thing?) and Lewandowsky is highlighting discrepancies between what was said in that document and what Frontiers claimed in its subsequent clarification notice.
For starters he notes that the retraction notice said that the journal's investigation of the paper did not identify any ethical issues, contrasting this with the position in the clarification that the paper did not sufficiently protect the rights of the subjects - an apparent reference to Lewandowsky's decision to enable the subjects of his research to be identified against his cod diagnoses of their psychological disorders. His observations about the contradiction between the two documents appear reasonable and I conclude that one of the statements must be wrong. My money would be on the first.
His second point is that although the clarification said that there had been no legal threats against them, BH reader Foxgoose has said that he had in fact issued such a threat. However, its seems that there is less to this point than meets the eye. Foxgoose's threats against the journal resulted in the removal of the offending passage from the paper which was subsequently reissued. His actions can therefore have played no part in the ultimate decision to take down the paper.
Lewandowsky says that the only issues that were ever discussed were legal threats and that no concerns over the ethics were ever discussed. Unfortunately, unless someone publishes the correspondence between the two sides we will never be able to verify this.
It seems to me, however, that there are two questions in play here. Firstly, were there ethical problems with the paper and was the journal right to take it down? The answer seems to me to be "yes". Secondly, has Frontiers dealt with the issue well? At the moment there is a possibility that the answer is "no", but no doubt there is more to be said on this question. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that it was agreed by the lawyers that Lewandowsky would be able to save face by means of a "legal threats" formula but that the journal has now resiled from this agreement in some way.
But this is mere speculation. We will have to wait and see.