A previous Minding the Campus article reported apparent plagiarism in an article by Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Panchanathan’s article was published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), but it copied extensively, without citation or quotation marks or copyright permission, from an article copyrighted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Although ACM claims to follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE), ACM refused to investigate Panchanathan’s uncited copying. I emailed ACM president Vicki Hanson to find out what was going on. She didn’t reply, but her attorney, Emily Reisbaum, did.
Reisbaum wrote: “you are not in search of the truth,” and instructed me not to communicate with any ACM staff. She warned that ACM staff “will take all appropriate actions to protect themselves.” Whatever that means. Are they armed?
Why would a scientific publisher threaten someone who asked about possible plagiarism by the NSF director? Why would a publisher prohibit someone from reporting misconduct? ACM’s response certainly creates a chilling effect on readers.
In search of the truth about ACM president Hanson, I consulted PubPeer. As it turns out, she herself engaged in the same practices as her colleague
[RELATED: Panchanathan.Harvard’s Hypocrite Hunt Nails Gino, Spares Gay]
Hanson’s book chapter “Sign Language in the Interface: Access for Deaf Signers” copied and paraphrased several sources without quotation marks or citations. Her 2004 ACM paper copied from her 2003 paper, but re-ordered the copied passages, creating the appearance of a new work. Twelve of the fourteen pages of text in her 2005 Taylor & Francis paper “Achieving a more usable World Wide Web” were copied from two prior publications copyrighted by ACM. Hanson’s 2015 ACM paper “Writing About Accessibility” copied most of her 2008 ACM paper “General Writing Guidelines for Technology and People with Disabilities,” but did not use quotation marks and did not include citations after the copied passages.
One of Hanson’s papers was even flagged for data errors. In some circles, this is a big deal: Harvard recently revoked a professor’s tenure for manipulating data.
It’s no surprise that ACM reacted with such hostility to a request to investigate possible misconduct by NSF director Panchanathan. Not only are the ACM president and the NSF director colleagues, but they also engaged in the same practices: copying without quotation marks, without citation, and without permission from copyright holders.
NSF is incapable of investigating misconduct by its director. Instead, NSF defers to the findings of Panchanathan’s home university, Arizona State University, which declined to determine whether he plagiarized. Moreover, the publisher ACM seems to be incapable of holding the NSF director accountable for engaging in the same practices as the ACM president.
Minding the campus proves to be difficult. Minding the NSF is even harder. Minding the academic publisher is practically impossible. And its staff will take all appropriate actions to protect themselves.
Image: “ACM signage on exterior of 1601 Broadway” by CmdrDan on Wikimedia Commons
