Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., is under growing pressure to clean up the scientific record and reinvestigate alleged misconduct by one of its most senior researchers.

Professor emeritus Reginald Smith, who continues to receive federal science grants, is at the centre of a self-plagiarism case that indicates there is a "double standard" at the university, says Queen's medical professor Steve Iscoe.

"How can I penalize a student for plagiarism if the university has not penalized Prof. Smith?" asks Iscoe.

He has asked Queen's Principal Daniel Woolf to re-open the investigation into the Smith case, which was recently made public by Postmedia News and made headlines in a top international science journal on Thursday.

"Self-plagiarism case prompts calls for agencies to tighten rules," says the report in the British journal Nature, noting how Smith "avoided censure" for self-plagiarism when Queen's and Canada's largest research council learned of the duplication in 2005.

Titles and abstracts on the science papers change, but large chunks of text and data were duplicated in as many as 20 publications co-authored by Smith with some of his students and colleagues.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which gives close to $1 billion in taxpayer funds a year to Canadian academics, was going to cut off Smith's science grants in 2006, say documents released to Postmedia News by the federal government under the access-to-information law. But the council backed down after Smith's lawyer threatened legal action.

Four of Smith's papers have subsequently been retracted by scientific journals at the urging of whistleblowers Mort Shirkhanzadeh and Chris Pickles of Queen's mining and materials department. The most recent retraction this fall was made by the European and British editors of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology, who pulled one of Smith's duplicate papers saying it was "a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system."

While calls for a review of the case are mounting, Queen's officials consider the case "closed," says Lorinda Peterson, associate director of the university's communications office. NSERC officials refuse to comment, citing privacy concerns.

Smith has declined to comment, referring reporters to Ken Clark, his Toronto lawyer. Clark noted Friday that Smith was reprimanded by the university in 2005 and has acknowledged and "apologized for his past mistakes."

"Any further investigations would be completely unnecessary and a waste of everyone's time and resources," Clark said by email.

Smith, 80, is a professor emeritus in Queen's mechanical and materials engineering department and an active researcher. He has received more than $600,000 in NSERC science grants since 1991 and was awarded $24,060 this year, the third instalment of a three-year "discovery" grant.

Smith has also worked extensively with the Canadian Space Agency, running experiments on how gravity affects glass and alloy production. Steve MacLean, now president of the Canadian Space Agency, was one of the astronauts to operate special furnaces in space for Smith's team. The astronauts fired samples in temperatures up to 900 C, generating data described in some of the disputed papers.

Republication, often described as "self-plagiarism," pales when compared to faking data or plagiarizing other people's work. But it is widely considered research misconduct as it can exaggerate a scientist's productivity when applying for grants in the "publish or perish" academic world. It also can cause confusion over copyright issues, and clutters the scientific literature.