In a move one research ethics expert called “odd,” a university asked one of its professors to attend a remedial integrity course — despite their “significant concerns” the training would have any impact following findings of misconduct.
In 2024, Retraction Watch covered the case of Govindasamy Ilangovan, then an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at The Ohio State University. We reported at that time two of his papers were retracted from Heart and Circulatory Physiology at the request of the university, and that university officials had requested a third retraction. Thanks to a public records request, we now have access to the university’s 2023 final investigation report, which provides us much more information.
The released material shows a committee of the university’s research integrity officers found Ilangovan responsible for manipulating images in three papers. OSU redacted the total number of images in question, but the investigators deemed it “very concerning.”
Ilangovan “failed to take any responsibility” for issues with the data, the report reads, and the committee requested he attend the PI Program through Washington University in St. Louis within one year. That program teaches researchers “decision-making skills, good lab leadership and management practices, and basic rules-of-the-road for the responsible conduct of research,” according to its homepage.
In 2022, 14 months before the report was finalized, Ilangovan requested the misconduct proceedings be terminated “without an admission,” according to the document. Despite being shown “overwhelming evidence that there were serious issues” with his papers, Ilangovan maintained the validity of his papers’ conclusions.
“The primary concern for a scientist should be the integrity of the published research record and in these circumstances, the voluntary retraction of the questioned publications would be expected,” the research integrity officers wrote. They expressed “significant concerns that additional training will have a meaningful impact.”
C.K. Gunsalus, an expert on university research misconduct, told us sending someone to remedial training makes sense for “certain kinds of problems that are, in fact, remedial: recordkeeping, some supervision practices, compliance issues, time management, etc.” We reported in 2016 a three-day “researcher rehab” had a “lasting impact” on scientists with shortcomings like these, with the “vast majority” changing how they work in the lab.
Although she called OSU’s research integrity committee “diligent in the investigation itself,” Gunsalus said “it’s pretty odd that they’re saying we have concerns about this person’s commitment to fundamental integrity and so we think he ought to get management and logistics help.”
The committee “seems to have made some judgments and then flinched at the consequences,” said Gunsalus, Director of the National Center for Principled Leadership & Research Ethics and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Chris Booker, OSU’s director of media and public relations, told us Ilangovan is no longer affiliated with the university and would not comment further on the personnel matter. An email sent to Ilangovan’s OSU email address bounced back, and he did not respond to a message sent to his LinkedIn profile.
A representative for Washington University told us they could neither confirm nor deny whether Ilangovan attended the remedial program, because “clients and all information related to study participation is strictly confidential.” Similarly, Booker would not comment on whether Ilangovan attended the program.
In addition to the PI training, the OSU investigation committee recommended a three-person OSU panel review all Ilangovan’s data for grants and papers for three years.
One of Ilangovan’s two now-retracted papers had a correction in 2021 for a figure that was “inaccurate because of the reuse and relabeling,” as we previously reported. The recently obtained investigation report indicates Ilangovan falsified data in that correction.
The identity of the third paper OSU said should be retracted, as well as details of the investigation pertaining to the article, are redacted from the report. However, footnotes in both the 2022 preliminary inquiry (which we also obtained through a public records request) and the final 2023 investigation report cite a December 2019 PubPeer comment, and only one of Ilangovan’s papers has drawn a PubPeer comment matching that description: a 2016 article appearing in Cardiovascular Research. The anonymous commenter pointed out possible “[d]uplicate images representing different experimental groups.”
Booker did not respond when we asked whether the university requested retraction of the Cardiovascular Research paper. Tomasz Guzik, the editor-in-chief of the journal, also did not respond when we asked if he had heard from the university.
The three papers together cite just shy of $1 million in National Institutes of Health grant funding given to Ilangovan. He told the investigating committee the grants were cited in the two retracted papers “just to describe the use of some equipment and other resources of the funded projects as used to carry out the experiments,” according to the 2022 inquiry report.
In 2018, we reported in Science that, following criticisms about transparency failures, OSU proactively released materials about another researcher guilty of misconduct. In that case, the committee recommended the retraction of eight papers.
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