UNC System official published federally funded paper in scrutinized journal

An associate vice president at the University of North Carolina System Office co-authored a federally-funded evaluation of an initiative she leads — without disclosing her role in the program — in an academic journal whose parent publisher has drawn editorial-integrity concerns, according to a Carolina Journal investigation. The administrator in question is Michelle L. Solér, who is also the project lead for the System-wide Math Pathways effort.

A review of publication records also found at least 12 UNC System faculty, across seven institutions, were named as authors in journals issued by the North American Business Press (NABP), including the now-disputed Student Health Ambassadors (SHA) paper at the center of a UNC Asheville whistleblower lawsuit.

The UNC System Office told CJ this spring that it maintains no central standards governing where its faculty publish.

The findings build on two earlier Carolina Journal stories. The first, published in March, reported on UNC Asheville’s North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness (NCCHW) and the whistleblower complaint filed by former research assistant Aidan Settman.

The second, published in April, examined NABP’s Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice (JHETP). CJ reported that JHETP was dropped from Scopus indexing in 2024. The journal also ranks Q4 — the lowest possible quartile — on the SCImago Journal Rankings and is rated tier C — the lowest designation — on the Australian Business Deans Council Journal Quality List.

CJ also documented that JHETP editor-in-chief Robert Tian sits on an editorial board at Allied Academies, a subsidiary of OMICS International. OMICS paid a $50.1 million Federal Trade Commission judgment in 2019 over deceptive academic publishing practices. Allied Academies was named as a corporate defendant in that injunction.

Individuals listed on NABP editorial boards, largely professors from real academic institutions, also told CJ they had no editorial relationship with the journals, leading to concerns of credibility laundering.

Math Pathways and the UNC System Office

A 2022 paper in JHETP, “UNC System Math Pathways’ Digital Course Enhancement Collaboration to Improve Equity, Instruction, and Access During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” describes a system-wide initiative to develop open educational resource collections during the COVID-19 pandemic. The collections covered high-enrollment college courses across UNC System campuses.

The paper acknowledges that “the development of the Course Content Collections was funded in part by the Federal CARES Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund.”

The UNC System Office’s Math Pathways Digital Course Enhancement Initiative was funded by a $5 million line item within a $44.4 million CARES Act allocation from the North Carolina General Assembly to the UNC Board of Governors, approved May 20, 2020. The allocation, established under House Bill 1043, designated $5 million for “Digital Learning Enhancements” as a discrete line item alongside per-institution allocations to UNC System campuses.

Solér is one of six listed authors. Her byline in the paper identifies her affiliation as “UNC System Office, Academic Affairs.” Her bio at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a UNC System institution where she serves on the Development Committee, identifies her as “project lead for the System-wide Math Pathways effort.”

Undisclosed roles

The Math Pathways paper acknowledges the CARES Act funding source but does not include a conflict-of-interest statement or an author-contributions section. It does not disclose that Solér was the project lead for the entire Math Pathways initiative that the paper evaluates.

The paper’s methods section states that “initiative evaluators from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Office of Assessment and Accreditation met with the Initiative leadership to create an assessment plan.” Co-author Karen E. Singer-Freeman, listed in her byline as affiliated with Wake Forest University, was director of academic planning and assessment at UNC Charlotte at the time the evaluation was conducted. The paper does not disclose that she was the evaluator.

The paper describes Math Pathways “math teams… led by Math Pathways co-chairs” without disclosing that two of the paper’s co-authors — Tamar A. Avineri and Tracey H. Howell — served as those co-chairs.

The paper’s conclusions are favorable to the initiative. The authors — who include the project lead, the institutional evaluator, and the two math-team co-chairs — report that 97% of early-adopter faculty found the work worthwhile and characterize the results as “a strong endorsement of the efficacy” of the supported classes.

The only acknowledgment of the funding source in the paper appears in a two-sentence statement at the end of the article and contains no statement regarding funder influence or evaluator independence.

Recognized standards for publication ethics require explicit disclosure of authors’ operational roles in the work being evaluated. According to the Committee on Publication Ethics, a watchdog group for integrity in academic and scientific writing, a conflict of interest is something that if undeclared but discovered later “would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived.”

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ Recommendations, the most widely cited disclosure standard across academic disciplines, additionally state that “perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.”

Academic ethics do not preclude program implementers from publishing evaluations of their own programs. But research-ethics guidance treats funder-tied evaluations as a conflict requiring disclosure, and studies funded by an interested sponsor are measurably more likely to report favorable results.

A pattern across seven institutions

The Math Pathways finding sits within a broader pattern.

Carolina Journal’s review of NABP publication records identified at least 12 UNC System faculty across seven UNC System institutions as named authors in NABP journals. The institutions are the UNC System Office, UNC Asheville, NC State, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, UNC Charlotte, Appalachian State, and East Carolina University.

For several of the faculty named in the dataset, the NABP appearance is abnormal within their broader publication record, which tends to show placements in higher-quality journals.

Joy H. Karriker, professor and chair of the East Carolina University Department of Management, authored a 2017 paper in NABP’s Journal of Organizational Psychology. Her other published work appears in venues including the Journal of Management, the Journal of Business Research, and the Journal of Management Education. Those venues sit several tiers above the NABP publication in published rankings.

U. Yeliz Eseryel, an East Carolina University associate professor in the Department of Management Information Systems, has a 2024 NABP paper in the Journal of Applied Business and Economics. She was recognized in 2024 as a UNC Board of Governors Distinguished Professor for Teaching. Her other published work appears in Elsevier’s Information & Management and Journal of Strategic Information Systems, both ranked among the top-tier journals in information systems research.

Other named UNC System faculty in NABP journals include Karen Ford-Eickhoff at UNC Charlotte’s Belk College of Business and Angela Yan Du, also at the Belk College.

System office: No policy

In response to questions from CJ for its June 8 story on Allied Academies, Andy Wallace, director of media relations for the UNC System Office, said the system does not maintain central policies, guidelines, or lists of approved or prohibited academic journals. Given the volume of journals across disciplines, he wrote, those judgments “are generally handled at the institutional, departmental or faculty level.”

That response was given before CJ documented that the System Office’s own associate vice president was a co-author of a CARES Act-funded paper in JHETP.

The publication-venue judgments Wallace described as delegated downward to institutions and faculty included a federally-funded program evaluation produced by the System Office itself.

Solér did not respond to a request for comment.

“UNC System official published federally funded paper in scrutinized journal” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.