Academics question NTU probe
CONFLICT OF INTEREST?One of the members of a committee investigating the NTU president is said to be a coauthor; another is a college dean he appointed
By Sean Lin / Staff reporter
Academics yesterday questioned the integrity of a committee tasked with investigating allegations National Taiwan University (NTU) president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) was involved in cowriting forged scientific papers.
Quoting NTU secretary-general Lin Ta-te (林達德), who said the five-member investigation committee includes two faculty members at the university, attorney Hsu Wen-hua (許文華) said that the two members are likely to be College of Life Sciences dean Min Ming-yuan (閔明源) and College of Medicine dean Chang Shan-chwen (張上淳).
“Assuming I am right, these two men are not suited to serve on the committee,” Hsu said, citing an NTU rule governing cases involving suspected breach of academic ethics, which states the selection of investigation committee members should not constitute a conflict of interest.
Chang and Yang cowrote five scientific papers between 2003 and 2006, for which Chang was either listed as the first author or corresponding author, while Yang was listed as the corresponding author on some accounts, he said.
Min was appointed acting dean by Yang when NTU professor Kuo Min-liang (郭明良) — with whom Yang coauthored four problematic articles that are now being investigated by the committee — assumed the post of Kaohsiung Medical University vice president, Hsu said.
Yang later chose Min over another university professor to fill the post of College of Life Sciences dean, Hsu said.
Hsu also raised doubts about why Yang was able to tell the media the constitution of the committee, which included two NTU faculty members and three Academia Sinica members, saying that Yang could have rigged the appointment of committee members.
NTU should have sent the papers in question to the journals that published them for verification, and at least one other established and objective third-party academic for review to ensure the investigation’s credibility, he said.
Saying that Kuo retracted his paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry last month after the academic fraud scandal erupted, NTU professor of psychology Huang Kwang-kuo (黃光國) accused Kuo of lying when he said he was innocent at a news conference on Dec. 20.
Kuo filed a request to pull the paper, which was found by the journal to contain forged results shown in six duplicated images, on Dec. 7, and on Dec. 30, the journal issued a statement that it had been retracted, Huang said.
Huang asked why Kuo had not repaid Yen Men-luh (嚴孟祿), a physician at National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, NT$6.73 million (US$208,617) Yen claimed to have lent Kuo between 2002 and 2014 to help Kuo pay a mortgage, referencing another academic scandal that broke last month, in which Kuo allegedly took the money in exchange for Yen to be listed as coauthor on 11 papers by his research team.
He also called into question why Kuo had never mentioned the debt during his tenure as a then-National Science Council (now Ministry of Science and Technology) official, even though he was required by law to declare his personal wealth.
Liu Yuan-chun (劉源俊), president of the Chinese-language Science Monthly, said that the academia puts too much emphasis on the number of citations an academic receives when promoting professors, which has tempted many professors to use their connections for them to be listed as coauthors or forge research findings to boost the number of their publications.
In response, the university reiterated that the committee is run in an objective manner.
The two colleges have met several times to review the papers, and the investigation results are to be submitted to an evaluation committee and an ad hoc committee for review on Friday next week, it said.
The evaluation committee will be headed by NTU vice president Chang Ching-ray (張慶瑞) and will operate independently, it said.
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