Simisola O.

Oludare

KN 503: Research Integrity

Dr. Mark Grabiner

Writing Assignment 1

10/10/2016

The key problems presented in this case are that the paper was sent to a journal for
review with an incomplete list of authors and that one of the unlisted authors accepted a request
to review the paper. These problems have occurred due to lack of attention to detail and poor
communication on the part of the corresponding author who made the error and also failed to
provide R1 and E1 an opportunity to review the final paper (and potentially spot the error).
Additionally, R1 is responsible for the problem due to his/her inability to recognize and take
ownership of his/her own work. Besides the authors’ loss of credibility due to the corrigendum,
the journal suffers for appearing to poorly review the paper. Also, the scientific community will
lose the advances made by this experiment until the resubmitted paper is resubmitted and
reviewed.

From the perspective of the journal, I do not think the editors should retract the paper
until there is evidence that R1 reviewed the paper with the intention of advancing his/her
institution’s interest (i.e. violating peer review). It could be purely due to incompetence and
miscommunication that R1 was unable to identify the final paper as his/her work. If this is the
case, then a retraction is too strict because it does not only harm the authors and the journals, it
also deprives the scientific community of work that could advance a field. However, if it is found
that R1 received the final manuscript and thus could undoubtedly identify his/her work, then it
can be concluded that his/her intention was to violate the peer review process. I think this is the
best solution to the problem because at the outset it appears that the peer review process has been
consciously violated, but on closer reading I am unable to determine whether the peer review
process was violated volitionally or accidentally. I believe that being able to make this
distinction is important because although incompetence should be discouraged, it does not
necessarily have to be punished. And if a punishment is instituted, R1 should be singled out for
not being able to identify his/her own paper.
 Writing Assignment 2

11/14/2016

There is a copyright issue because Rose is using content from her textbooks which are
protected by copyright.

It wouldn’t matter if Rose only charged for the database because it is her idea and it was
developed using her own resources.

The university cannot claim intellectual property (IP) rights to Rose’s program because it
was created using her resources. However, it can claim ownership of the database because the
university owns the professor’s lectures.

Rose’s activities have infringed on the IP of her professors if they own their lectures and
if Rose doesn’t decouple the database from the program.