Following the case of plagiarism that was brought to light by the retraction of a paper in the journal Biotechnology Advances, the Vice Chancellor has responded by email:
Dear Sir,
Thanks for your mail.
As soon as we came to know about the plagiarism complaint against the reesearchers from our division of Molecular and cellular biology, we have formed a committe of senior faculty members of our university to probe the same.We have also taken action as per the committee’s report. The committee’s report and the action taken details were informed to the DST and other funding agencies in India.
We have also advised our university’s research community to take proper care to strictly avoid occurring of such complaints in future
Dr.S.Radhakrishnan
Vice-Chancellor Kalasalingam University
Update 4th February:
The VC’s response is a little disappointing in that he has advised the university’s research community only to avoid future complaints and not to avoid the misconduct itself. He surely can not mean that the actions are acceptable if complaints are avoided.
So far there has been no response to a request to provide a copy of the “committees report”. It is still not known as to who served on this committee and what their conclusions and recommendations were. What sanctions are to be applied to those found responsible for misconduct is also unknown.
The k2p blog 