A number of events are worthy of a post, but the most urgent to bring to my readers’ attention is a development at Nature Materials. They have issued a correction to the 2008 paper by Francesco Stellacci, Nature Materials 7, 588 – 595 (2008). Thanks to Pep (despite stating he would no longer comment on this blog) for pointing this out in a comment on my blog entitled “Responses-to-evidence-of-self-plagiarism“. I have raised the issue of data re-use multiple times (no pun intended!) including these posts:
Responses-to-evidence-of-self-plagiarism
Well over the line: an update
Well-over-the-line-when-does-minor-become-major
Over-the-line
For those who don’t feel like clicking through the links, the text of the correction at Nature Materials is:
” * In the version of this Article originally published, in the caption for Fig. 1 the following statement should have been included “Right-hand STM image in panel a reproduced with permission from ref. 30, © 2008 RSC.” This error has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.”
Self-plagiarism is perhaps not the best term: data re-use may be a better descriptor, hence the change of tack in my title. I still wonder what the referees’ reaction to a fully attributed figure might have been? In my limited experience, if a figure in the main body of a manuscript is attributed correctly to a previous paper, reviewers tend to be pretty hard and one receives comments along these lines: “don’t you have another image, and if not, why not”. Which is reasonable, since one will have multiple replicates, both technical and on different preparations.
Anyway, this is just idle speculation from someone who is meant to be painting a bedroom – displacement activity or procrastination, depending on your viewpoint.
I am sure with such positive development from NPG that Philip Moriarty will receive very soon the raw data he has repeatedly requested from Francesco Stellacci.
Reblogged this on Rapha-z-lab and commented:
An important development: the first correction in the series of stripy papers; read on at Dave’s blog
[…] The issues of data re-use/self-plagiarism has already been discussed here and in a number of posts at David Fernig’s blog. […]
[…] from this correction. Unlike the previous correction in Nature Materials, which I posted on (here and here), the correction at PNAS involves new data being […]
[…] Ferniglab’s Blog shares a more serious point of view with a post on “Data re-use warrants correction at […]
[…] including one at PNAS where data were re-used to describe a completely different experiment (here and […]
[…] azienda a Trento creata nel 2006 (tutto fermo dal 2010?). Nel frattempo, la controversia sulle sue particelle d’oro a (presunte) strisce per molecole terapeutiche continua dal […]
[…] The discussions on what constitutes plagiarism continue. One side, which I belong to, believes simply that the rules we establish for our students are the same rules we should be using in our professional life. In the specific context of the publications that claim evidence for ligands self-organising into stripes on the surface of nanoparticles, I have posted on this issue previously, due to the re-use of unattributed data in five of the papers from the Stellacci lab (here). I used the University of Liverpool rules on plagiarism and collusion as the basis of my argument, and then made the broad claim that the same rules apply across all universities. Since the papers in which data are re-used were published whilst the group were at MIT, it is of interest to look specifically at the rules at that Institution. These are described in an excellent document entitled “Academic Integrity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: A Handbook for Students“. To quote from page 6 of this document “If you use charts, graphs, data sets, or numerical information obtained from another person or from published material, you must also cite the source.”. Of course, if one is publishing, then there is also the legal issue of copyright and formal agreement has to be obtained from the publisher for the reproduction of the original data. This seems pretty clear cut to me and it will be of interest to see what will be the response from the relevant institutions considering this matter. It is perhaps naive, but it would seem reasonable to expect that if there is no response, then a student violating these rules could simply hire a lawyer and get their full marks. This would be a bad day for higher education. Update 3 November 2013 the re-used figures have been the subject of corrections, see here and here. […]
[…] 3 November 2013 Cases 1 and 5 have been subject to a correction in the relevant […]
[…] data re-use resulted in corrections, albeit after a degree of pressure was placed on editors (see here and […]
[…] on the re-use of figures in different articles. This eventually led to two corrections, one at Nature Materials and one at PNAS. An EPFL investigation was triggered, opened, and, eventually, following the […]