Image tampering increasingly common in scientific journals

The Federal Office of Research Integrity says that 44 per­cent of its cases between 2005 and 2006 involved image fraud. That’s up from 6 per­cent a decade ago.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub­scrip­tion prob­a­bly required), out of the 300 or so arti­cles accepted each year by the Journal of Clinical Investigation, 10 to 20 may have been tam­pered with.

Some young researchers may not even think of image edit­ing as being wrong, the CHE reports, con­sid­er­ing the ease of image manip­u­la­tion. However, experts con­tend that even chang­ing a few pix­els for clarity’s sake can alter the mean­ing of that image.

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4. University of Virginia shut­ting down pub­lic com­puter labs to save money
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