NSF Director Accused of Copying Research Without Credit. No One Will Investigate.

Federal agencies pay for research at colleges and universities. Those institutions also charge overhead—called Facilities and Administrative (F&A) or indirect costs—by billing the agency at a fixed rate applied to the direct costs.

Arizona State University (ASU) charges 57 percent for F&A. When a professor spends $100,000 of grant money on direct costs, ASU collects an additional $57,000 for administrative overhead.

A discussion on the PubPeer “post-publication peer review” (PPPR) website reported that an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) paper by Arizona State University (ASU) professor and director of National Science Foundation Sethuraman Panchanathan copied about a quarter of an earlier Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) paper. The ACM version did not cite the source or indicate the copyright holder’s permission. It added two ASU authors who didn’t write the earlier IEEE version. The ACM version purported to “propose” an approach previously presented in the earlier IEEE version.

Side-by-side examples from PubPeer are shown below, with the IEEE version on the left and the later ACM version on the right.

ASU professor Panchanathan had assigned “all rights” to IEEE. ACM’s copyright form requires that third-party permission must be clearly stated in the text, but no such statement is in the ACM publication.

Arizona State University

Panchanathan has been on an extended leave of absence from ASU since June 2020, when then-President Donald Trump tapped him to serve as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded his ACM paper (grant 9950168). He is also an ACM Fellow.

At ASU, “Academic Dishonesty” includes copying work from any other source without properly acknowledging and documenting the source. However, it is not in ASU’s interest to find that it misused NSF funds.

More than thirty ASU personnel—including ASU’s president and its research integrity officer—were asked whether Professor Panchanathan’s uncited copying, without permission of the copyright holder, violates ASU’s policies. None of them responded.

National Science Board

The National Science Board (NSB) oversees NSF. Professor Panchanathan was appointed to the Board in 2014. It is not in the Board’s interest to find that its own member engaged in misconduct.

Congress

The U.S. Senate has a subcommittee on Space and Science overseeing NSF. The Honorable Kyrsten Sinema chairs the subcommittee. Senator Sinema graduated from ASU and is a teaching professor in ASU’s School of Social Work. It is not in the Arizona senator’s interest to find that her ASU colleague engaged in misconduct.

Association of Computing Machinery

ACM is a 501(c)(3) non-profit Delaware Corporation (EIN: 13-1921358). ACM’s code of ethics (number 1.5) states that computing professionals should credit the creators and respect copyrights and other methods of protecting authors’ works. However, in an email obtained by Minding the Campus, ACM’s ethics committee stated that it “will NOT be investigating” Professor Panchanathan’s paper.

In addition, the ACM Intellectual Property and Rights Manager demanded a copy of Professor Panchanathan’s ACM paper that ACM itself had published and wanted the identity of the PubPeer anonymous commenter.

ACM prohibits dishonest publication, which includes self-plagiarism and falsification. But, in 2023, ACM reached a verdict of misconduct in only 8 of 36 cases (22%) and took an average of more than 10 months to reach a decision.

ACM CEO Vicki Hanson and Panchanathan go way back. They served together as organizers of ACM’s 2005 and 2008 Conference on Computers and Accessibility. In 2014, Hanson was on the Program Board for a conference in Crete, where Panchanathan chaired his own session. The conference reception is archived online.

ACM CEO Hanson was chair of ACM’s special interest group, in which Professor Panchanathan participated. It is not in the ACM CEO’s interest to investigate whether her colleague engaged in misconduct.

Committee on Publication Ethics

ACM is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). “Signing up to COPE shows that your journal (or company) intends to … apply COPE principles of publication ethics outlined in the Core Practices.” These Core Practices include post-publication discussions “on an external moderated site, such as PubPeer.” COPE provides post-publication resources for members. These resources include a flowchart for “Handling of post-publication critiques.”

ACM advertises that its policies are consistent with COPE’s. However, ACM’s policy is that “anonymous claims are not investigated,” whereas COPE “supports a whistleblower’s right to remain anonymous.”

The ACM Publications Director stated in a December 2024 email that:

ACM takes all allegations of misconduct very seriously … [however,] ACM always reserves the right to ratify and implement our own policies and procedures for conducting investigations. If you have an issue with this, you should take this up with COPE, but we are obligated to follow our own policies and procedures [rather than apply COPE’s].

Although ACM is a COPE member, COPE explained via email that it “cannot review concerns about that publication” by Professor Panchanathan.

ACM pays COPE an annual fee of £2728 (USD$ 3,470). It is not in COPE’s interest to eject ACM from its dues-paying membership.

Delaware

Delaware takes consumer fraud very seriously. Delaware law (Title 6 Subtitle II Chapter 25. Subchapter II. “Consumer Fraud”) was established to:

protect consumers … from unfair or deceptive merchandising practices … [T]his subchapter shall be liberally construed and applied to promote its underlying purposes and policies.

Delaware’s Consumer Fraud law prohibits any misrepresentation in connection with advertisement. Delaware courts are empowered to annul the charter of a Delaware corporation and appoint a Receiver to settle the estate and distribute the corporation’s assets.

Call to Action

Conflicts of interest can be seen in every organization that has the authority to investigate whether the ACM paper by ASU professor and NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan was inappropriately copied from a copyrighted IEEE paper without citing the source or using quotation marks. These organizations were unresponsive when asked for an opinion on whether the uncited copying violates their published policies — except for ACM, which declined to investigate. If you have never contacted supervisory organizations to raise concerns about plagiarism or falsification, you might be surprised by this situation and might wonder what can possibly be done to encourage genuine oversight of the USA’s science-and-technology agency.

If you, the reader, wish to assist in minding the National Science Foundation, you might consider providing your full name and affiliation (per ACM policy), together with a link to this article, to ACM Director of Publications Scott Delman and ACM CEO Vicki Hanson so that ACM can reconsider whether to investigate the NSF director’s uncited copying.

In addition, you can bring this matter to the attention of Arizona State University President Michael Crow so that an investigation can be performed.

You can also contact the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to ask whether ACM and its journals should have their membership revoked until such time as they demonstrate that they adhere to COPE’s guidelines.

If you happen to be friends with Delaware’s attorney general, you could point out that a Delaware corporation, advertising itself to comport with COPE’s procedures, should adhere to COPE’s procedures to avoid deceptive advertising. The State of Delaware might be persuaded to exercise its oversight of ACM, which could then be motivated to exercise its oversight of the NSF director’s publication by retracting it with a notice of ethics violation, which could motivate the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Space and Science to hold the National Science Board accountable for lack of oversight of publication practices within NSF, which caused its director’s paper to be called out for research misconduct.

It takes patience to move the needle. By minding the NSF, readers can contribute to minding the campus.

Image of Sethuraman Panchanathan on Wikipedia