Assistant Professor A suspected that Doctoral Researcher B had slandered A, hindered the publication of joint articles, and prevented productions from being presented to the public. Later, A added suspicions about authorship to their notification of this case. Doctoral Researcher B also filed a notification of the same case, suspecting A of fabrication, falsification of observations, plagiarism or misappropriation, and misleading the research community.
The Rector of the university combined all three notifications into one decision. According to the decision, B had, to some degree, committed the alleged RI violations presented by A in the notifications. The nature of the violations misled the research community about the respondent's research, which was connected to B's erroneous understanding of the content and extent of copyright and their severe negligence of research integrity due to ignorance. The RI violations presented in B's notification had not been committed by A.
In TENK's view, the rector's decision was partially based on an erroneous interpretation of the TENK 2023 Guidelines. Ignorance as potential grounds for an RI violation is defined in the TENK 2023 Guidelines, but this RI process should have followed the 2012 RI Guidelines. However, the investigation of the case was otherwise carried out according to TENK's guidelines.
Even though the dispute had been prolonged, it was not possible to determine such gross negligence or irresponsibility in either party's actions that the actions could be assessed as an RI violation. Generally, a project manager does not have the authority to define the scientific or artistic results independently achieved by individual members or the manner in which the results are made public.