My name is Nikolay Zak, I am the author of recently published study questioning the validity of the age of Jeanne Calment. My paper, published in January https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.... is based on the study which I conducted in Autumn 2018. I've touched this subject in a paper published in Russian in October (which I cite) and described it in the presentation to the Russian gerontology society in the early November. I made my presentation publicly available. Unfortunately, some people started to publish their reviews on the subject on blogs and social networks, not always giving credit to me as the author of this study. As a result, popular press produced some really confusing reports in late December and early January. For some reason, the authors of the review "Late-life mortality is underestimated because of data errors" published in Plos biology do not refer to my study as a reference, instead they cite an extremely rare book on insurance which I found during my study, without citing me as the secondary source. Instead of making the proper reference to my paper, they include it to their supplementary file along with some questionable blog entries based on my study which they call "preprints" and some popular press with a distorted picture presented in it. I consider such a practice as not scientific and I ask the authors and the editors of Plos biology to change the text to give credit appropriately.
I hope there will be no need for the Moscow Society of Naturalists to write an official complaint to Plos asking for retraction of this review by Gavrilovs.

Yours, Nikolay