One point made in , a posting by Raphael on the lack of evidence for stripes on nanoparticles is the duplication of data between
Figure 2 in Chem Comm 2008, 196 and Figure 1 in Nat Mater. 2008 (7):588-95
What is most surprising is how little comment such duplication has raised.
It is, after all, one of the prime reasons for papers featuring on Retraction Watch. I don’t know what the policies of Nature Publishing Group or the RSC are, but at Elsevier, looking to preserve the reputation of the brand (and so sales), data duplication leads to retraction and a reasonably transparent editorial notice (rightly applauded on Retraction Watch).
So whether there are stripes or not, for these two papers there is a serious editorial decision to be made.
I have discussed the hinterland of this subject before, in a posting on Research Integrity. This last post was the result of my becoming aware of the massive plagiarism of data (re-use of same data in multiple papers, sometimes for different experiments) by Prof. Melendez, highlighted on the Abnormal Science blog.
Prof. Melendez, who was at NUS, then moved to Glasgow and then to the University of Liverpool – hence my interest. After an internal investigation at Liverpool (which I was not party to), he left the University.
So the bottom line is that data duplication is not acceptable. We should remember that we go to considerable lengths to educate our undergraduates on this point – they have to push every piece of work through Turnitin (or similar software), any figure that is taken from a source must be attributed and so on. Cheating in exams results in a zero. If we start to condone data re-use in our professional lives, then we are not only transgressing the rules of the publishers, but we jeopardise our entire teaching efforts. We would also become the laughing stock of the primary and secondary teaching establishments, which quite correctly, drum into their pupils from an early age that plagiarism is not done. The relevant government departments and parliament would also take a very dim view.
Ferniglab Blog 
Agree entirely, Dave, and the key problem is that this is not the only instance of self-plagiarism. There are other examples in the striped nanoparticle controversy of where the same image (or a cropped version of a previously published image) has been used.
Compare, for example, Fig. 1(a) of Jackson et al. JACS 128 1135 (2006) with Fig. 2 of J. Scanning Probe Microscopy Research 4 24 (2009). The former is a cropped version of the latter, which in turn has also been used elsewhere. If this was a review article, fine(-ish), but even then the source of the original figure should be credited. (I’d also like to get hold of the raw images so that I could adjust the contrast, which is saturated in many places).
As I’ve said to Francesco, the fact that data have to be ‘recycled’ like this suggests that reproducibility is an issue…
Thanks for pointing out further data re-use. Not good to see it is more pervasive.
http://bit.ly/XUVj6G
The comment above by Pep is unilateral, since one cannot leave a comment on his blog site. Worse, considering he is an editor of a scientific journal, it is an apologia for the re-use of data from the Chem Commun paper in a subsequent Nature Materials paper on the grounds that: “Although the Nature Materials paper does indeed not mention explicitly that the scans had been published before, the text does refer to the Chem. Comms paper (as ref. 30) when describing the synthesis and characterization of the striped nanoparticles (which is not what the paper is about), making it implicit that the content of Fig. 1a (imaging of the nanoparticles) came from earlier work.”.
Sorry. This argument holds no water whatsoever.
Students are taught as undergraduates that ALL text and Figures that are not their own MUST be formally attributed. For “minor plagiarism”, infringement results in a formal interview, loss of some marks and a slapped wrist, though repeated “minor plagiarism” equals “major plagiarism”. Similar policies operate in every University I know across the globe. One reads the “Instructions to Authors” of journals and they state very clearly that work MUST not have been published elsewhere. OK, we can re-use if we attribute, but this obviously has to be explicit, e.g., “Fig.1 A, left panel from Ref #30”. Whether breaking this rule constitutes “Minor” or Major” plagiarism is the business of the journal’s Editorial Board, the equivalent of a “Plagiarism and Collusion Committee” in a University. Decisions by these bodies impact on the reputation of the institution and on the future behaviour of authors or students.
So at the very least one would want to issue a corrigendum, but I don’t think anyone would expect an individual to be apologising for data re-use, other than the authors. Remember all the authors will have read the paper and in this instance a number are on both papers and so will be aware of the data re-use. They cannot have forgotten what was drummed into them at University during their undergraduate studies and their postgraduate years.
A quick look demonstrates that NPG publicly takes a strong line on these issues. For example, the comment on the report coming out from NUS regarding the Melendez fraud. So NPG publicly have a clear stance on the issue of data re-use, which is aligned to my comments above, which in turn are nothing terribly original, just standard practice in teaching and research. However, I would argue that the apologia in the comment from Pep is at odds with such practice.
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