A researcher claimed that his unpublished and rejected manuscript had been plagiarized in an article published in a respected scientific journal. The researcher contacted the journal and demanded to be included in the list of authors. The journal’s editor, who also was the corresponding author of the article, was affiliated with the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at UiO. Therefore, the case was referred to The Research Ethics Committee at UiO (REC).
Both the manuscript and the article dealt with historical research and were based on overlapping periods and areas. Both were interdisciplinary projects with contributions from several researchers, including some who participated in both projects. REC’s mandate limited the assessment to solely those researchers affiliated with UiO.
The researcher behind the unpublished manuscript, and two other researchers associated with the published work, gave in-person explanations to REC. Additionally, written documentation was presented.
REC’s starting point was that scientific misconduct according to The Norwegian Research Ethics Act (2017) depends on two conditions: whether there has indeed been a breach of research ethical norms, and whether one or more researchers have acted sufficiently negligent. There must be a clear preponderance of evidence for this to be proven.
REC decided to divide the case into phases. First, they assessed the allegations of plagiarism in the published article and which researchers could potentially be held responsible. They also considered whether the unpublished manuscript was an indivisible collaborative work. Then, REC assessed the claim by the researcher behind the unpublished manuscript to be recognized as a co-author of the published work.
The researcher claimed that three significant paragraphs from the manuscript had been plagiarized, making an independent publication of the manuscript pointless. The opposing party argued that the similarities were either due to the use of the same publicly available information or were written by co-authors who had contributed to both projects. A controversial claim from these co-authors was that the manuscript was not a collaborative work but consisted of independent individual contributions that could be taken forward to other projects. However, REC considered that the manuscript clearly appeared as a collaborative work since a reader could not identify which researcher had written which parts, and the manuscript had also been attempted to be published as a whole. This was in line with the guidelines from The Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (NENT) and the definition of "joint work" in The Norwegian Copyright Act (2018).
All co-authors of the unpublished manuscript were thus entitled to be cited if the work was reused, as the rules on proper referencing also apply to unpublished scientific works and the reuse of one’s own previous works. REC noted that the guidelines on proper referencing also apply to the use of publicly available information.
REC then evaluated the three contested paragraphs and found that the content was very similar in the published article as in the unpublished manuscript. They also found no agreement that allowed the collaborative work to be terminated and individual contributions to be used freely. Consequently, REC concluded that the reproduction of the three paragraphs, and two of the illustrations, in the published article without correct source references constituted a substantial case of plagiarism. The use of a third illustration was