Retraction Watch have an article up about the Wegman plagiarism stuff (also covered by Eli).
GMU aren't making the full report public, though, doubtless to protect the guilty (which I think largely means the shoddiness of the report). There is an oddity in what they have released:
As sanction, Professor Wegman has been asked to apologize to the journal involved, while retracting the article; and I am placing an official letter of reprimand in his file
How can Wegman retract the article? It was retracted by the editors some time ago, on the grounds of plagiarism.
Don't forget, though, that Wegman plagiarised, but there is worse.
Refs
* GMU still paralyzed; Wegman, Rapp still paranoid - DSB
* GMU contradictory decisions on Wegman: Plagiarism in CSDA, but not in 2006 congressional report
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Of course, see the discussion at the original discovery point, Deep Climate, whose first page shows the side-by-side that was good enough to be declared plagiarism in CSDA, but not the Wegman Report.
GMU contradictory decisions on Wegman: Plagiarism in CSDA, but not in 2006 congressional report
http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/22/gmu-contradictory-decisions-on-wegman…
Shorter DC:
This is plagiarism when it is in in the journal CSDA, but not when it's in the Wegman Report.
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/wegman-social-networks-v…
Well, this explains the Gleick affair. That whole thing was obviously ginned up to draw attention away from Wegman's disgrace.
GMU FINALLY did something about this? Nice.
GMU handled this masterfully - from their point of view.
Sit on the case until most people have forgotten about it. Then issue a split decision that gives a wrist-tap sanction to Wegman so that no one can accuse them of a whitewash. Finding that Wegman had given spurious testimony to Congress would have been a Really Big Deal, so they gave him a pass on that one and sanctioned him on the paper.
The fact that GMU instructed Wegman to withdraw a paper that the journal had already retracted is especially interesting. Two possibilities come to mind. One is that their investigation was so slipshod that they were unaware of the journal retraction. The other is that the decision was made long ago (i.e., before the journal retraction), and they waited for the right moment to release it so that it would get as little attention as possible. By announcing the decision now, it gets lost in the noise of the Heartland-Gleick brouhaha instead of being a singular event.
[I hadn't thought of the idea that they'd made the decision much earlier - that seems a possibility. Or, agreed, they could just be really really shipshod, though that seems hard to believe (I think another reason they gave in on that paper was because they already knew it was lost) -W]
Of course they made the decision a while ago.
SIGMU p.6 summarizes GMU' (weak) policy.
Nomrinal
252 days: investigation committee wites report, up to 120 days after start.
282 days (+30): allow for appeal
382 days (+100 more) President writes decision on appeal.
so they could have decided 120+30+100 days ago.
As seen in STaE, Wegman was fighting tooth and nail, and the Force was with him.
DC just added another interesting addition to the Wegman plagiarism saga:
http://deepclimate.org/2012/03/16/wiley-coverup-the-great-wegman-and-sa…
[Thanks. My sources informed me of that, but I've yet to read it properly -W]