Rio Tinto fails in bid to have Serbian scientists' Jadar paper retracted

The company made three separate attempts to challenge the Serbian scientists’ findings about the Jadar project in Scientific Reports.

The journal’s editorial board rejected Rio Tinto’s objections, but agreed to publish minor technical corrections.

Three Serbian scientists involved in preliminary environmental impact studies for the Jadar project, and Rio Tinto’s chief scientist Dr. Nigel Steward, requested the retraction of the paper by Dragana Djordjevic and her team from the journal Scientific Reports - Nature. Rio Tinto said the retraction was requested because the paper contains “factual inaccuracies, inconsistent application of scientific methodology, and numerous other flaws.”

They accused Dragana Djordjevic and her colleagues of drawing incorrect and scientifically unfounded conclusions.

The company said the paper misleads both the scientific community and the public about the potential environmental impacts of the Jadar project.