Comment by Proziam
1 day ago
If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
We have a civil court system to handle stuff like this already.
We also have a criminal court system to handle stuff like this.
No we don't. I've never seen a private contract dispute go to criminal court, probably because it's a civil matter.
If they actually committed theft, well then that already is illegal too.
But right now, doing "shitty research" isn't illegal and it's unlikely it ever will be.
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Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.
EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.
It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.
Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
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