The average scientist now has cause to worry. At the conference, Jules Hallum, director of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), summarized the activities of his organization, which investigates cases of alleged scientific misconduct in NIH-funded research. At its start in 1989, OSI had 70 cases; it has since resolved 110 cases and now faces a backlog of 70 more. Other agencies have their own staffs to handle such cases. Scientific misconduct, as defined by NIH, includes falsification of data or plagiarism--as well as practices that "seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted" by the scientific community. (The National Science Foundation has a similar definition.) Scientific misconduct is an offense with no statute of limitations and no significant body of case law to serve as precedent.
Surely, egregious falsification or plagiarism is an outrage that should be punished. But as Eleanor Shore, dean for faculty ...
