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Green Party leader Elizabeth May agrees.

“You can’t be known as a country that has any kind of claim on legitimacy in science but say: ‘Well, we don’t really like to let people know when we have cheaters’,” she said in an interview.

“I don’t think you can build academic and scientific excellence with that kind of policy,” says May, who hopes the renewed controversy and international attention over NSERC’s secretive approach will prompt change.

The editorial in Nature said “Canada’s practices take privacy concerns too far.” It pointed to two cases of “seemingly egregious” misconduct at Canadian universities involving scientists who had received funding from NSERC — which recently released heavily censored documents describing the cases.

But council officials say the Privacy Act will not let them name the researchers or universities involved. NSERC even kept secret information on how the misconduct was punished, which Nature says “seems absurd.”

The NSERC documents, obtained by Postmedia News under the access to information law, describe one case in which a researcher faked experiments, then moved to another institution that may have known nothing of his misconduct.

A second case, which Nature describes as “even more remarkable,” involved a scientist who padded his CV and grant application with studies that did not exist anywhere in the published literature.

The names of the wrong-doers have been blacked out in the documents released by NSERC, along with details on the faked research and the identity of the universities where the misconduct took place.