[Federal Register Volume 77, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 3, 2012)]
[Notices]
[Page 125]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2011-33651]


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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Office of the Secretary


Findings of Research Misconduct

AGENCY: Office of the Secretary, HHS.

ACTION: Notice.

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SUMMARY: Notice is hereby given that the Office of Research Integrity 
(ORI) has taken final action in the following case:
    Mahesh Visvanathan, Ph.D., Kansas University: Based on an inquiry 
conducted and written admission obtained by Kansas University (KU) and 
additional analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review, ORI found 
that Dr. Mahesh Visvanathan, Research Assistant Professor in the K-
INBRE \1\ Bioinformatics Core Facility, KU, engaged in research 
misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) 
funds, specifically the INBRE program of the National Center for 
Research Resources (NCRR), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant 
P20 RR016475.
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    \1\ K-INBRE: The Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research 
Excellence, which is a consortium of a number of schools and centers 
in Kansas.
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    Specifically, ORI found that Respondent engaged in research 
misconduct by intentionally and knowingly plagiarizing large amounts of 
text from other writers' published papers without attribution or 
citation in the following three (3) papers and one (1) abstract. The 
specific published documents as well as the relevant source documents 
are:
     Visvanathan, M., Adagarla, B., Lushington, G., 
Sittampalam, S., Proceedings of the 2009 International Joint Conference 
on Bioinformatics, Systems, Biology and Intelligent Computing, 2009, 
494-497. Greater than half (50%) of the total text was obtained from 
(1) Yang, C.-S., Chuang, L.-Y., Ke, C.-H., Yang, C.-H., International 
Journal of Computer Science, International Association of Engineers, 
August 2008 35(3), (2) Goffard, N. and Weiller, G., Nucleic Acids 
Research, 2007, 35L:W176- W18l, and (3) Chuang, L.-Y., Yang, C.-H., Tu, 
C.-J., Yang, C.-H., Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Information 
Sciences, Atlantis Press, October 2006.
    Retracted: Retracted administratively by IEEE on Jan 5, 2011 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5260432.
     Vijayan, A.; Skariah, B. E., Nair, B.; Lushington, G., 
Subramanian, S., Visvanathan, M., Proceedings of the IEEE International 
Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Workshop, 2009, BIBMW2009, 
267-271. Approximately 15%of the text was plagiarized from Goffard, N. 
and Weiller, G., Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, 35L:W176-W18l.
    Retracted: Retracted administratively by IEEE on Jan 5, 2011 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/BIBMW.2009.5332106.
     Visvanathan, M., Netzer, M., Seger, M., Adagarla, B. S., 
Baumgartner, C., Sittampalam, S., Lushington, G., International Journal 
of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2009, 2,236-251. A complete 
paragraph of the text was plagiarized from Goffard, N. and Weiller, G., 
Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, 35L:W176- W18l.
     Adagarla, B., Lushington, G., Visvanathan, M., ISMB 
International Conference, January 2009; the entire abstract for this 
poster was obtained by plagiarizing text from Pihur, V., Datta, S., 
Datta S., Genomics, 2003, 92:400- 403.
    Dr. Visvanathan has entered into a Voluntary Settlement Agreement 
(Agreement) and has voluntarily agreed for a period of two (2) years, 
beginning on December 20, 2011:
    (1) To have any PHS-supported research supervised; ORI acknowledges 
that Respondent's research is currently being supervised by KU; 
Respondent shall ensure that a plan for supervision of his PHS-related 
duties is submitted to ORI for approval either within two weeks of this 
Agreement becoming final or prior to receiving or applying for PHS 
funds if such support is not current at the time this Agreement is 
completed; the supervision plan must be designed to ensure the 
scientific integrity of his research contribution; because of the 
ongoing review of Respondent's research by KU, ORI will only require a 
summary report on the first and second anniversary of the Agreement 
detailing how KU has ensured that Respondent's research and language in 
PHS grant applications and reports of PHS-supported research have been 
verified to be his own and accurately reported; Respondent agrees to 
maintain responsibility for compliance with the agreed upon supervision 
plan;
    (2) That this annual summary, provided by any institution employing 
him, shall provide assurance that each application for PHS funds, or 
report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS-supported research in 
which Respondent was involved, was based on actual experiments or was 
otherwise legitimately derived, that the data, procedures, and 
methodology were accurately reported in the application, report, 
manuscript, or abstract, and that the text in such submissions was his 
own or properly cited the source of copied language and ideas; and
    (3) To exclude himself from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS 
including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, 
board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Director, Division of Investigative 
Oversight, Office of Research Integrity, 1101 Wootton Parkway, Suite 
750, Rockville, MD 20852. (240) 453-8800.

John Dahlberg,
Director, Division of Investigative Oversight, Office of Research 
Integrity.
[FR Doc. 2011-33651 Filed 12-30-11; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4150-31-P