The latest posting on Raphaël’s blog is the most comprehensive catalogue of data re-use in the papers by Francesco Stellacci on the phase separation of ligands on gold nanoparticles into stripes. As Raphaël notes, this information has been communicated to the Ombudsman of EPFL.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of discussing this same issue with the MIT Ombudsman, a really helpful and professional person who does MIT real credit. I have followed her advice and sent the same litany of re-used data to the Vice President for Research at MIT, Professor Maria Zuber, copied to the relevant Dean and Head of Department. I have may got the last two wrong, for which I can only offer apologies. My rather lame defence being that I find that universities (my own included) have a wondrous talent for making their structures somewhat obscure to the onlooker.
The rules for academic misconduct at EPFL and MIT are the same as those at other research-led universities, something that I have posted on before (here and here). Now we wait and see what the response is. The response will understandably take time, since these institutions have a clear process to undertake, which is not trivial.
[…] to be problematic. In one sense this is an update post on “Chalk and Cheese“, “Re-use of “stripes”“, “Correct correction?” and “Data re-use warrants correction at PNAS: see […]
[…] assiduous reader will recall that on March 22 I formally contacted MIT regarding the re-use of images in multiple papers by Francesco Stellacci. This includes one […]