Academic Miscreants Remain Anonymous (Almost)

From an editorial in Nature:

[H]eavily censored documents, released by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the country's science-funding agency, described a case in which a researcher had faked data, then moved to another institution that may have known nothing of the episode. . .

. . . A second, even more remarkable, case involved a scientist who padded his CV with papers that did not exist anywhere in the published literature.

But the names of the wrong-doers were blacked out, as were the citations of retracted papers and the details of the research fields affected. In some cases, information on the misconduct findings and the nature of the wrong-doing was also redacted. One document retained sentences of a letter in which someone — presumably a misconduct perpetrator — offered abject apologies and argued that cutting off his research funding would harm his students, but blacked out the name and numbers of people involved. In another, a black rectangle obscured a list of six problematic journal articles, some of which are apparently fictitious.

As it happens, the brilliant website Retraction Watch has fingered the miscreant. 4Sers among us will be interested in pondering NSERC's strange conduct.

A footnote: Nature makes an unfortunate and misguided, but all too common, comment. "Taxpayers have a right to know about instances in which their money has been misused," they write. Actually, all citizens have this right. Why exclude billionaires?