A recent Minding the Campus article reported that more than two dozen publications, co-authored by Arizona State University (ASU) professor Sethuraman Panchanathan, have been flagged on PubPeer. Panchanathan is the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which outsources plagiarism investigations to the universities it funds.
If you were a university funded by NSF, would you admit to NSF that your faculty misused grants by plagiarizing? No, you would not.
I wrote to officials at ASU and its board of regents to find out whether any of the examples on PubPeer met ASU’s definition of “plagiarism”—namely, “use of someone else’s ideas, words or products without giving credit”—and whether the authors infringed copyrights or committed fraud by misrepresenting work as novel when it had already been published.
ASU Executive Vice President Sally Morton replied, saying, “no research misconduct has occurred.”
ASU didn’t answer the basic questions. Was it plagiarism or not? Was it fraud or not? Was it copyright infringement or not? There was no answer to those questions. I had not even asked them whether “misconduct has occurred.” ASU blithely answered a question nobody asked while dodging the questions that were actually asked.
As an example, PubPeer reports that Panchanathan’s 2017 World Scientific paper “Enriching the Fan Experience in a Smart Stadium Using Internet of Things Technologies” copied two-thirds of a 2016 IEEE paper by other authors, “Holistic features for real-time crowd behaviour anomaly detection.”
Panchanathan’s 2017 version did not enclose copied passages in quotation marks. He repeatedly described, as a “proposed approach,” methods that others had already published in their 2016 version. His 2017 version added five ASU authors from Panchanathan’s “CUbIC” research group. They took credit for the words of the earlier non-ASU authors. They didn’t indicate permission from the copyright holder, IEEE. Still, ASU doesn’t call this research misconduct. ASU doesn’t address that Panchanathan used “someone else’s ideas, words or products without giving credit” and copied extensively from copyrighted work and misrepresented the copied work as being novel.
Here are examples from the PubPeer report. On the left is the version by a group in Dublin, Ireland. On the right is the version that added Panchanathan’s group at ASU:
ASU, like other universities, employs a clever policy to evade consequences for plagiarism: “a finding of research misconduct requires that there be a significant departure from the conventions of the relevant research community.” So, when the conventions of the relevant research community include plagiarism, fraud, and copyright infringement, “no research misconduct has occurred” when one of its members engages in the practices.
Image: “2021 Arizona State University, Tempe Campus, ‘Beacon of Knowledge’, Hayden Lawn” by Beyond My Ken on Wikimedia Commons
