A big con at UConn?

At 60,000 pages, the University of Connecticut's report into alleged misconduct by Dipak Das is so huge that its executive summary alone runs to 49 pages!

The Retraction Watch blog has been all over this case with several posts (each with links to all the relevant documents).

A Boston Globe   editorial -- UConn’s account of research flaws should be a model for others -- praises UConn for its handling of the Das case, and contrasts it with Harvard's handling of the Hauser case:

... after the federal government’s Office of Research Integrity relayed a complaint in 2008 of possible misconduct in a research paper produced by Das’s center, UConn launched an extensive investigation. After the special review panel concluded that Das and his team had manipulated images in dozens of instances, UConn sent letters to 11 journals that had published their work, vowed to return $890,000 in federal grants, and started disciplinary proceedings. The university also noted that it is investigating others in Das’s lab.

UConn’s detailed reporting of the Das situation contrasts sharply with, for instance, Harvard’s limited explanation of its inquiry into the work of renowned psychologist Marc Hauser. Even after an investigating committee found Hauser “solely responsible . . . for eight instances of scientific misconduct,’’ administrators were remarkably vague about the nature of his offenses. A dean’s letter noting that the data in one of Hauser’s published experiments “did not support the published findings’’ left open an obvious question: Why not?

Thanks to Richard Symonds for his comment-alert about the Boston Globe editorial.