◆ The Office of Management and Budget has published guidance for agencies and recipients of federal awards and contracts, finalizing a document issued in February by adding new sections and revisions to the Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards that OMB said “clarify areas of misinterpretation” and are “intended to reduce recipient burden by improving consistent interpretation.” Scheduled for publication in the Aug. 13 Federal Register, the guidance was posted on the Register’s Public Inspection website on Aug. 11. But OMB also said the final guidance reflects a “foundational shift” and a “focus on improved stewardship and ensuring that the American people are receiving value for funds spent on grant programs.” (8/13/20)

◆ A former postdoctoral fellow at Wayne State University has agreed to a 10-year debarment for misconduct involving his dissertation and more than a dozen published papers, and a then-assistant professor of pharmacy at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center accepted a plan for three years of supervision for inserting plagiarized and fabricated data into four NIH applications, the HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recently announced. According to ORI’s Aug. 7 notice on its website, Zhiwei Wang, former postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pathology at Wayne State’s Karmanos Cancer Institute, engaged in extensive misconduct beginning with his 2006 dissertation and including nine funded and three unfunded grants and 14 papers published from 2006 to 2013. A number have been corrected or retracted as a result of the misconduct, which consisted of Wang’s reuse and relabeling of images and figures involving bands of proteins. The debarment began July 21; the settlement agreement also calls for Wang to refrain from advising the Public Health Service (PHS) during the 10-year period. He also will seek a retraction of a paper published in 2008.