As a public school teacher in Kentucky I helped create a project that brought University of Kentucky (UK) professional students into our K–12 classrooms to inspire kids. My husband and I coined the name, chose the color scheme, designed the lesson plan process, and even took the original photos. This wasn’t a one-off. We worked on this idea for years before ever moving to Kentucky.
I coordinated between UK and the school district and helped students design accessible lesson plans for younger learners. Now, UK medical students and a staff member published an article claiming credit for this initiative — using our words, our pictures, and our concept, without giving us any recognition. They volunteered at our events but didn’t create the idea or the program. Even others who did contribute intellectually were left out.
UK’s College of Medicine and legal team have ignored every attempt we’ve made to correct this. I feel betrayed. As a teacher, I always tell my students to value honesty and give credit where it’s due. Institutions should be held to the same standard.
Plagiarism is wrong. Silence is complicity. Everyone deserves credit for their work.
What can be done about this?
EDIT:
A few clarifications:
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Posting here was a last resort. We actually reached out to the 3 students and the staff member weeks BEFORE this poster came out, asking specifically about continuing with the publication that we (my husband and I) had initiated…they didn’t even respond to us.
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This was a poster in a research conference at University of Kentucky, College of Medicine. We had larger publications in talks and if it wasn’t for me calling them out on social media, I have reason to believe they may have taken this further, considering that they and everyone we have reached out to within UK has ignored us.
Comments
I’m so sorry you’re going through this! I hope you get your recognition
That sound so wrong. How can anyone just silently copy your concept and publish about it? Wouldn’t it be just easier and a win-win to involve you in this?
Where was it published? Like on their blog (look what we have done to get more school students into science) or as a scientific article (a novel university outreach concept to bring more students into science, journal/conference on science attractiveness)?
If it’s the former, i would find it annoying but ignore it. It’s nasty but doesn’t matter. If it is the later, you can also contact the journal or publisher of the journal (after giving the university enough time to react, say two weeks). Be sure to document your prior work so that you can prove that it’s your concept.
If this is a published article in an academic conference or academic journal, thus framed as “research”, you could contact the UK office of research integrity and take up your complaint with them.
You could contact a local news station or the school newspaper as well.
Contact the journal editor – they have the power to retract. Also contact the institutional review board which supervises research ethics.
see edits below
I’m not sure the university legal team is your best contact — they’re likely to ignore anything that doesn’t come with some legitimate and substantive legal challenge. You should contact their office of research misconduct. You can email [email protected]. If the medical school is operated separately (not clear from a quick search), they should tell you. You could afterwards contact their VP of Research, but if the above office doesn’t respond, I might not expect them to, either.
Is this an article in an academic journal of some kind? If so, you should absolutely contact the editorial board for that journal and report the plagiarism. Happy to help you locate contact information if you can share more information about where it’s published.
Also, what do you mean by “staff member?” Was it a professor? If it’s non-faculty and some med students, you may be in luck, because I doubt the university is going to protect them very hard. If it’s faculty, you may have a harder time, but that will depend on their rank and other things. Tread lightly — your post indicates you’re in the right, but that doesn’t mean you have power or anyone will care. With that in mind, please don’t make threats about legal action, going to the press, etc., unless you can back them up. They’ll turtle up and you’ll be forced to follow through.
That said, if you don’t find any resolution through official channels, put them on blast. Name and shame.
EDIT: Just saw the OP’s other post. It’s a poster, although not much other than that is clear. Look, plagiarism is wrong. You should absolutely contact their advisor and the medical school and tell them that this work is plagiarized. The students and their advisor should be disciplined in some capacity for plagiarism, and you should get ahead of them thinking they can publish this work without you.
However, context matters for what happens next. Without any details about what the conference was, we can’t really give you any good advice. If this is a local poster presentation at the medical school, let’s just be real: nothing will happen, because this local poster means nothing professionally. If this is a larger conference organized by some body — like a professional organization — maybe the organization will do something like repeal the membership of the authors. If this is a large conference with a published proceedings, things may get more serious because the proceedings may be peer-reviewed, but who knows — conference proceedings are largely ignored by most biomedical fields.
Them plagiarizing you is still very, very wrong. But frankly, most poster presentations mean either nothing or next to nothing in a professional sense, so you’re going to have an exceptionally difficult time finding someone who cares enough (or can) do anything about it. Best you can hope for is to correct the students’ behavior.
I’ll also add that, without very specific details, we online should be cautious in judging this too harshly. Academic authorship is tricky and sometimes quite subjective. For example, they may have acknowledged you in the poster somewhere (without putting you on the authors list), and may make an argument this is sufficient. I don’t know. I can’t read the poster and don’t have the details.
EDIT 2: I CAN’T STOP DIGGING.
Okay, found the abstract buried online. It’s a local conference and a poster by students in a community health program. They don’t even have a faculty member or other supervisor as an author, as far as I can tell, so I suspect this is students being oblivious, lazy, or shitty, in order from most to least likely.
I dunno if OP was acknowledged on the poster or not. We don’t know the extent of OP’s involvement. Plagiarism is still wrong, but the stakes are very low here, so not really sure what to make of it.
That said, they do mention doing surveys and things of that nature, so this definitely falls within the realm of research. OP, if you still have serious concerns, I stand by contacting the office of research integrity, but also know that this is going to burn any bridge you may have with the supervisor that you organized this particular outreach program with, if any… for whatever that’s worth.
I presume you have a faculty contact there? That you’ve personally interacted with these students and their supervisor(s)? Why didn’t just sending them an email fix the problem??? Who have you been emailing???
To be clear, if these students used your photographs, ideas, whatever without your permission and attribution, they need to be disciplined. This is serious business. But… it also seems like this problem is blown out of proportion, and may have been resolved without ever reaching legal of all things. I’ve had my peer-reviewed work copy-pasted into articles in other journals, and I’ve never had to interact with legal to get that work retracted. I guess it’s just becoming clear that there’s some serious miscommunications here, between you and the authors, and also between you and us super important internet sleuths here at reddit. Perhaps the ORI is the best channel to fix it, because they should take it seriously… especially since I’m starting to get the impression there wasn’t the right sort of approval to do this research, given that OP wasn’t given information on the nature of the research and plans for presentation/publication.
you said they published it? Is this a real article (as in peer reviewed journal)? If so, you can contact the journal + ethical team of that publisher. Show them the proof you were first etc. This might end up in a retraction and the school will have to investigate. This might be a way to pressure them.
Work you did in the course of your public school employment is probably being regarded as belonging to the public school.
You absolutely should have been acknowledged in the paper.
But the degree of the problem depends on what data were published. Did you give permission for an evaluation? Did the participants appropriately give permission? Do you have documents delineating who “owns” the data collected in an evaluation? The answers to those questions will determine what your options are now.
Based on your other post this isn’t an article but a poster. Posters tend to be taken less seriously than an article (partly because an article is permanently available online whereas a poster is often a one-off presentation). I recognize this is a very frustrating experience and you deserve an apology but if this is just a poster at a random conference in the long run they won’t gain too much benefit from it, and there isn’t anything to retract.
Have you contacted the faculty involved? Faculty are usually pretty nervous about plagiarism so they will likely clamp down on the students presenting this work again.
Contact the journal and demand a retraction.
I am a UK faculty, though I am not in the College of Medicine.
First, you should get a lawyer if you don’t have one, just to get some guidance on how to preserve and put together your own evidence.
-All of the original work you did, preserve the original files with time stamps on every version.
-Any invitations or overtures you made to the Medical School to ask them to participate
-Any additional communication with Medical School staff regarding scheduling, etc.
-Any communication with your superiors or staff (VP, secretaries, whatever) about this event and your role in it.
-Any communication between yourself and your husband regarding the project
Make sure everything has a time stamp of some kind.
If you have all that together, then I’d go to the Office of Research Integrity, which is housed in the VP for Research office. Contact information is here: 859-257-9428 ([email protected]).
The other thing to do is to contact the journal and tell them you have solid evidence that these people misrepresented the research. They will listen to you. If you are convincing, they will act on it.
Finally, I’d just say this: UK has an army of lawyers that shield them from any consequences, whether they are at fault or not. UK legal is there to protect UK, not to be neutral arbiters in a dispute with UK. Stop calling them. They won’t care.
But one thing Capilouto hates is bad publicity. For that reason, you might find some satisfaction going to Linda Blackford, who covers all things education for the Herald Leader ([email protected], 859-488-1571). I think she would be interested in your story. If she thinks it has real legs, she’ll publish it.
That said, be very careful that you can prove what you are saying. That is, you have time stamped files and images showing these ideas, images, text, and so forth originated with you, you have correspondence with your VP about getting UK involved, you have emails reaching out to them about the relationship, etc.
Finally, as a quick and dirty piece of advice: next time you come up with a fabulous idea, print everything out, write up a description, put it in an envelope and mail it to yourself as a certified letter but do not open it. Only then contact people about your idea. Your envelope can be unsealed in court or by your lawyer and that provides support for your timeline that some idea or creative endeavor originated with you.
Good luck.
Contact any journals to let them know. Then, get a lawyer – nothing is taken seriously until they get a certified letter on a law office letterhead.
What is the resolution you are hoping for? That they take down the article or that they revise it to give credit?
That will change the approach.
Because this involves students, contact Academic Affairs and Operations.
OP, your recourse is going to be different because it is a poster that was presented rather than an academic article (based on the other post in your history). I couldn’t read the poster very well, so it’s hard to truly say, but it looks poorly done to me.
It seems more like a “this was an educational experience we did” rather than a “this is a program that we developed/evaluated/researched.” Sometimes students will present a poster on another type of educational experience rather than original research.
The reason they would include your actual logo is to showcase your program. Did they include attribution to the program website? Or any history of the program? Again, this poster is not well done, and your complaints may very well be valid. It’s going to be a very different ball game if they are insinuating that they developed/or had intellectual stake in the program. I don’t agree with them using your photos.
If they didn’t conduct research (e.g., no evaluation/human subjects), then the IRB will probably not be your go to. I would say this is a more of an academic honesty issue that could be pursued at the medical school.
Contact the editors of the academic journal it was published in. Provide evidence. They will be more neutral than UK and also have a strong motive for getting it right that the UK obviously doesn’t have
The university office of integrity. Demonstrate you have attempted to resolve this.
Anywhere it has been published, even if it is not an academic journal. Offer to show them the evidence.
I would contact the IRB of the university who employed the professors who stole your work. They’re like an ethics board. If they have any balls they will investigate this.
So if this is teaching focused it may have not gone through IRB as some have suggested as an avenue. The Dean and Chair and Provost/President however will listen.
Honestly, this coulda started out as an oversight, as many times people dont think those inside academia care, but it has since spiraled outta control.
I would go to The Guardian. They have channels to make these complaints, and think would love to publish about this. will get your voice out there! hope it works out this SUCKS and it is so unethical
Everyone, this seems like a poster at some research symposium and not a published article. OP, sucks you were left out but It’s low hanging fruit and not something academics really take seriously. Think of it like a “what I did over the summer share and tell” than a serious academic piece of work.
Contact the dean and provost of the university, not just the researcher. I was once falsely accused and they contacted my dean. I easily proved it was a false accusation, but it prompted a quick response from their end. Contact the journal editor if it’s published. Provide documentation.
If your organization was officially recognized as a student club at the University of Kentucky, it would have been required to establish a constitution and bylaws. Typically, the university includes provisions in those governing documents that assign intellectual property rights to the institution, especially when university resources or funding are involved.
I recall seeing social media posts regarding this matter, possibly from your husband. With that in mind, I’d advise proceeding with caution, as some of the public claims being made are approaching the threshold of potential defamation of character and reputation.
I truly sympathize with your frustration—it’s understandably disheartening to see work that was intended to make a positive impact now caught in a difficult situation involving institutional policies. However, it’s important to recognize that the University has substantial resources at its disposal. It’s likely that the College of Medicine, or at least the students being accused, are aware of these allegations and may be monitoring social media content for defamatory remarks.
If the intellectual property rights to the materials in question (such as photos) do in fact belong to the University, as is often the case, then there may not be legal grounds to pursue an ownership claim. On the other hand, continued public accusations without substantiated evidence could eventually result in a strong case being made against you for defamation.
Depending on the content of the poster (which is hard to see) it may not reach the level of plagiarism or academic dishonesty. Do you have more information about the context it which it was presented or the content of the poster or an abstract for it? It still would be rude for them not to at least have acknowledgments to the folks who designed the program, but without more knowledge about what is being claimed its hard to say if it is just inconsiderate or actual academic dishonesty.
Write a letter to the editor in chief of the journal that published it. Send along your receipts.
Send a letter to the university (not the medical school) expressing concern about the academic honesty of the authors.
I’m a little confused as to why you’re trying and not a lawyer at this point.
I would contact their Office of Research Integrity. Someone has violated IRB (shorthand for Institutional Review Board, it basically controls how you handle research on human subjects, and it’s just not possible this didn’t violate IRB somehow) and directly violated research ethics. I would contact their ORI and let them know you’re going to contact the journal. Then I would contact the journal. If they wanted to publish on this, they could have EASILY made you a co-author to zero detriment to them.
I’m frankly unsurprised. I remember reading an article from some doctors claiming to have pioneered introducing spirituality into medicine in the 90s and I’m like “I’m literally reading a published article from a nurse in 1963 talking about how nurses can provide spiritual care. A simple search could’ve populated dozens of similar results predating your research.” Physicians love to steal credit, especially from women and people working in feminized careers.
Just FYI I reposted to r/UniversityOfKentucky and the comments there may be of interest. Hope you are able to pursue this further. https://www.reddit.com/r/UniversityofKentucky/s/tdCDlLzlXB
The more I think about this, the more I’m leaning toward the idea that the med students didn’t know any better. There is no UK faculty member on the poster, which clearly indicates that they didn’t know poster etiquette. At the end of the day, they’re still students and learning…
You should be able to get free legal aid. If you are a senior citizen (over 60) the state should be able to help you. Take it to the news stations. Intellectual theft especially perpetrated by a university is wrong. You can also contact the Office of Research Compliance and call the ethics Point hotline -number should be on the university website.
You need to contact the editor of the journal directly. This is what I would do because they are the ones with the most power to pull the paper. Then go to an ombudsman or provost at UK. I’m less sure about who on the university side of things are the right person to contact but I’m positive the editor of the journal where the paper is published would care to hear about this.