Reaction to the case of Tomáš Hudlický

On 4th June, Angewandte Chemie has published an opinion paper “Organic synthesis—Where now?” is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affairs by Brock University professor Tomáš Hudlický, which generated a storm of criticism. The journal quickly removed the paper from its website and replaced it by „An Open Letter to Our Community“. The paper cannot be tracked by its digital object identification (DOI) anymore. The university published “An open letter to the Brock community“ on its website. (Our member Jan Konvalinka, the Vice-Rector of the Charles University, responded by writing the letter to the President and Vice-Chancellor of the Brock University.)

The circumstances of the retraction have lead 45 members of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic to publish this statement:

The undersigned members of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic support in the strongest sense the freedom of expression. We believe that free exchange of ideas is a key condition for the pursuit of truth and that the honest opinions should be scrutinized, challenged or rebutted but not censored or suppressed. We are concerned by the fact that professor Hudlicky accepted paper disappeared from the scientific literature and that he is apparently threatened by further administrative actions. Attack on academic freedom is attack on all of us.

Michal Anděl
Miroslav Bárta
Ondřej Čadek
Jiří Čejka
František Čermák
Jaroslav Doležel
Pavel Drábek
Karel Dušek
Eduard Feireisl
Jiří Forejt
František Foret
Libor Grubhoffer
Eva Hajičová
Ivan Hlaváček
Pavel Hobza
Michal Hocek
Cyril Höschl
Pavel Jelínek
Zdeněk Jirák
Pavel Jungwirth
Tomáš Jungwirth
Marian Karlický
Petr Klán
Roman Kotecký
Jan Kuklík
Jan Květ
Jan Lepš
Julius Lukeš
Pavel Martásek
Jan Palouš
Jaroslav Pánek
Aleš Pultr
Jan Royt
Aleš Růžička
Vladimír Sklenář
Petr Slavíček
Ivo Starý
David Storch
Vladimír Špirko
Jiří Šponer
Jan Štěpán
Jan Trlifaj
Vladimír Vonka
Radek Zbořil
Tomáš Zima