Bell Labs physicist found guilty of misconduct
Recent allegations of misconduct by Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Labs have been found true according to a report released by an independent investigative committee. Lucent Technologies, parent of Bell Labs, has terminated Schön's employment.
Schön, previously regarded as a leading young scientist in superconductivity, condensed-matter physics and solid state devices, has been the subject of an investigation initiated by Lucent Technologies in May 2002.
Of 24 specific misconduct allegations, Schön was found guilty of 16. Six of the remaining allegations were found to be troubling but without compelling evidence of misconduct and two were judged to have no clear relationship to publications.
All of Schön's co-authors have been cleared of scientific misconduct. The committee reserved judgement about whether professional responsibility was maintained by those co-authors.
The committee found Schön guilty of substituting data from one experiment for another, re-using the same data to represent multiple experiments, failure to keep systematic records of experiments, and destruction of samples, data and working devices. Schön was found to have acted intentionally or recklessly and without the knowledge of his co-authors.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect this case raises is that of co-authorship. What should the responsibilities of co-authors be? The most stringent criterion would be that all authors are entirely responsible for all of the content of a paper. However, this is unrealistic in some circumstances. For example, in this case Christian Kloc prepared some samples of materials that were used by Schön. Most would agree that Kloc deserved to be a co-author but should not be held responsible for what others did with those samples.
At the other end of the spectrum, the rule could be that authors should not be responsible for the actions of their co-authors, but this is also not acceptable to the scientific community. The issue of co-authorship needs significantly more discussion in the scientific community and more detailed guidelines for the roles of co-authors need to be developed.
Although the report refrains from passing judgement on co-authors as it says this issue is beyond the remit of the investigative committee, it makes some strong statements that suggest some of Schon's co-authors should have taken more responsibility for the papers to which they signed their names.
Most scientific bodies include in their guidelines on professional ethics some statement about the role of co-authors. However, these issues reveal that those guidelines are insufficient for judging the particulars of individual cases. At least one professional body, the American Physical Society, is currently revising their guidelines with respect to co-authors.
Lucent Technologies issued a press release this afternoon about the findings and the full report of the committee is available online. The executive summary is also available online separately.
A side issue arising from this is what will happen to a paper Schon submitted to Science and was published as a ScienceExpress article online but has not been assigned to a paper copy of the journal. Seeing as Science does not seem to have a clear policy on whether or not online publication constitutes official publication, will this article make it into the scientific record? Perhaps this case will prompt a rethink of the policy for that journal and perhaps bring it in line with other journals that use their online publication date as the official date of publication for articles.
