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Case 2h :

Falsification—A Picture is worth a thousand problems

Professor Lim roared at the three students,

"Those two images there cost us half our grant funding. We will use them as many times as we can, wherever we can".

"How dare those reviewers get persnickety with us about a single image being used more than once? And who are they to decide what is original? The research is original, the images are original, the paper is original work. We sent it for review at the same time—the same day even, as the Cell piece. Cell just happens to be a better and faster journal. If these stupid reviewers did their jobs in a timely manner, we wouldn't have this problem".

"If you want to be an academic, Jansen, you best learn how to deal with nonsense like this. If you want to continue in this lab, you need to find a way to solve this problem… today".

And, with that Professor Lim stormed out of the lab, leaving Jansen (the post-doc in the lab), Zane, and Armin (two PhD students) wondering what this all meant for them and, more pressingly, how to please Professor Lim!

The problem arose when the editors of Metabolism finally returned the reviews of the paper that the lab had submitted 5 months ago. Cell had only taken 8 weeks to review the paper, the group turned around revisions in a week, and the paper was accepted 11 weeks from original submission. Metabolism had taken twice as long for first reviews!

When the group submitted the two papers in question, they had submitted the same two, critical, photos to the journals. Cell had put the images up in their "on-line first" journal, and one reviewer at Metabolism told the editor that s/he had found duplicate images in the lab's paper. This was, nominally true, but there was no way to cite images under review in one journal, being reviewed by another, was there?

As the most senior "student" in the lab, Jansen felt obligated to fix the problem. After walking down for a cigarette and coffee break (he had recently started to smoke again due to stress in the lab), he came up with, what he believed to be a brilliant idea.

The images in question were the best of a series of cell photos taken and the lab had the files of the "bad" images available. Jansen thought aloud, talking to the frogs and mosquitoes,

"All of the images have a time and date stamp. We can cut the relevant parts of the image we want to use and paste it into a file with a different time and date stamp. That way, we can resubmit to Metabolism, claiming we uploaded the image from the wrong date, and the images look different enough to reviewers that they won't believe they are duplicates (it was just a "filing" error), and we can get around this whole mess of duplicate submission".

Jansen returned to the lab with a bit more enthusiasm, ready to tell Zane and Armin his brilliant plan. They could solve the problem, please Professor Lim, get the editors off their backs, and, with any luck would be home in time for dinner at a proper hour!

• Can you identify any problems with Jansen's proposal?
• Are these problems better or worse than those which already exist?
• What might the team have done to prevent any of these problems in the first place?
• What are the consequences if you follow Jansen's plan?
• Will following Jansen's plan make things better or worse?
   

Imagine that you are Armin or Zane and Jansen comes to reveal his plan to you:

• What is your response to Jansen?
• Would this constitute a case of duplicate submission?
• Would this be a case of image manipulation?