National Taiwan University (NTU) president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) yesterday said that the controversy surrounding an article he coauthored with research teams led by former NTU professor Kuo Min-liang (郭明良) has become the greatest crisis in his academic career.
Yang made the remark at a news conference at the university to clarify what he said were false allegations by users of online academic forum PubPeer.
Forum users have said that Kuo’s research team submitted five articles on cancer studies to international journals that used duplicated or edited images to forge research findings.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Four of the articles listed Yang as a coauthor, while the other was pulled by the journal Nature Cell Biology after the controversy began.
Kuo resigned from the university on Friday over the incident.
Regarding questions raised about the four papers he coauthored, Yang said that errors in two of the papers, published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2004 and 2006, were corrected in the same year they were published, Yang said.
Another article, published by the journal Cancer Cell in 2006, was corrected in 2008, he said, adding that the three articles are now legitimate.
The coauthor of the last remaining article in doubt, published in 2006 by Cancer Research, was as of yesterday still contacting the journal to request that corrections be made, he said.
None of the articles he cowrote have been retracted, he said.
Yang said that as PubPeer allows users to leave comments anonymously, information on the Web site is not always accurate.
He said that a seven-member committee whose members include three Academia Sinica fellows and a US academic who has experience handling controversy concerning PubPeer’s integrity would be created to probe alleged breaches of academic ethics, adding that he would cooperate with the investigation.
Asked by reporters whether the incident is the greatest crisis he has faced in his career, Yang replied in the affirmative.
“However, I will be honest and approach it seriously. It is regrettable that this incident has occurred. This should not have happened in academia,” he said.
In related news, the Control Yuan launched an investigation into the ongoing scandal of alleged data manipulation implicating Kuo, stating that the allegations have negatively impacted Taiwanese research in biomedicine as well as the reputation of NTU.
According to Control Yuan members Chang Kuei-mei (仉桂美) and Wang Mei-yu (王美玉), PubPeer has since revealed that 11 papers published by NTU are problematic, including the four coauthored by Yang.
While it is common in academia for senior researchers to have their names cited in papers of less experienced academics, the Control Yuan said it would look into such practices to ensure they do not violate academic ethics.
Additional reporting by Jake Chung, staff writer
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