Despite Plagiarism, Award for Quake Center Will Stand

After a six-week investigation, the National Science Foundation has concluded that portions of a winning proposal to build a national earthquake research center in Buffalo, N.Y., were copied from material elsewhere. However, the foundation said the plagiarism was not sufficiently serious to reverse the decision.

The $25-million award to the State University of New York, Buffalo, has been the subject of controversy since it was announced last August. The grant was made after a nine-month competition in which university consortiums from New York and California were the finalists.

The foundation said the copying by the New York science team involved background material only. “The lack of attribution to the sources was carelessness . . . and there is not a sufficient basis to overturn the award,” said the report by the foundation’s Division of Audit and Oversight.

Following the August announcement, members of the California science team charged that the selection process had been tainted by irregularities, and later accused the New York scientists of copying from material previously published by members of the California team. They have asked for a reopening of the competition for the Earthquake Engineering Research Center.

In its report, the Science Foundation--the federal government’s principal agency for making scientific grants--also contended that its procedures were followed correctly. “The process was reasonable, carried out adequately,” it said.

In a surprise development, the report revealed for the first time that the California application also is under investigation for copying.

The report identified the questionable sections of the California applications as being a list of categories of structures threatened by earthquakes and several pages of tables and charts.

“This material appears to have been taken from three other reports, all of which are widely known. Little textual material has been copied verbatim, but the principle remains the same,” the report said.

Jerome H. Fregeau, chief of the Audit and Oversight Division, said in a telephone interview that the specific list of allegedly copied items had been forwarded to the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, the lead university in the California consortium.

Fregeau declined to identify the items specifically but said that the source of the allegations was the New York earthquake team. “The Buffalo people suggested we take a look at these areas,” he said.

In California, several members of the earthquake team said they have not seen the specific allegations regarding their own work. “The allusions seem to be rather vague and guilt-by-association,” said Wilfred Iwan, an earthquake engineer at Caltech. “I would not be at all surprised to find out that we are accused of copying from our own work. There’s a difference between copying your work and copying someone else’s.”

Another seismic expert expressed disappointment with the results of the foundation’s report made available Monday. “I wonder if there are any procedures at NSF that mean anything,” said Tom Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission.

In Berkeley, officials in Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman’s office said no communication has yet been received concerning the charges. According to Fregeau, the chancellor will be asked to conduct an inquiry into the allegations and submit a reply to the foundation.

The charges against the New York proposal involved about 50 lines of material that had been taken from a 1984 document published by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in El Cerrito. One of the authors of the document was Paul Jennings, an earthquake engineer at Caltech and member of the California team. In addition, another paragraph of material was copied from a document by Iwan.

In Buffalo, the head of the New York team described the original allegations as “ridiculous.” Robert Ketter, named to be the director of the center, said, “A reference was dropped inadvertently; that’s all there was to it.”

Ketter added that the program in Buffalo is now under way. “We have conducted our first meetings to consider the first year of research,” he said.

But some California representatives maintain that the fight is not over. The Government Accounting Office is conducting its own investigation into the impropriety charges against the foundation. That investigation is expected to be completed in several months.

“What the (foundation) has said is nothing more than an apology for their previous decision,” Tobin said. “This is hardly the end of the game.”

In Washington, Sen. Pete Wilson (R.-Calif.) said he was “spectacularly unimpressed with what appears to be an attempt by the NSF to stonewall.” If college students had done what the New York scientists did, Wilson said, they would be expelled.