Office of Research Integrity Takes Final Action Against Case Reserve Prof

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), part of the Deapartment of Health and Human Services, gave notice last week that it has taken final action in the case of a researcher from Case Reserve Western University.

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The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, gave notice last week that it has taken final action in the case of a researcher from Case Reserve Western University.

According to the ORI's case summary, Dr. Pratima Karnik, an assistant professor in the school's Department of Dermatology was found to have committed misconduct in research submitted in a grant application to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The office discovered that Dr. Karnik had plagiarized large parts of another grant application she had reviewed for NIAMS and used that text in her own grant application. In addition she had pilfered large parts of text from a U.S. patent application and parts of the scientific articles listed below:

BMC Med Genomics 4:8, 2011
J Am Col. Cardiol 52:117-123, 2008
Nature 457:910-914, 2009
J Autoimmun 29:310-318, 2007
U.S. Patent Application No. 20090047269 (published Feb. 19, 2009)
Toxicol Pathol 35:952-957, 2007
BMC Med Genomics 1:10, 2008
Open Systems Biology Journal 1:1-8, 2008
Endocrinology 146:4189-4191, 2005

Dr. Karnik agreed to a Voluntary Settlement Agreement, which began July 22, 2013. That means she agrees to have her research supervised and any research project she is involved in that is submitted to the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) for funding requires her to submit a plan for the "supervision of her duties" to the ORI, which must then approve that plan.

The settlement agreement also states that:

"any institution employing her shall submit in conjunction with each application for PHS funds, or report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS-supported research in which Respondent is involved, a certification to ORI that the content is free of plagiarized material, data provided by Respondent are based on actual experiments or are otherwise legitimately derived, and that the data, procedures, and methodology are accurately reported in the application, report, manuscript, or abstract."

Lastly, Dr. Karnik must voluntarily remove herself from acting as an advisor to PHS in any way.