If Professor Salem were going to be listed as a Co-Principal Investigator on the NSF proposal, then there would be no problem with what he proposed. If he is not listed in that capacity, then the verbatim use of his material would mislead the proposal reviewers into thinking Professor Northfield had written the introduction when in fact he had not. The material has been misappropriated, albeit with the original author's consent.

Some may argue that the author's consent and the fact that the material was not published under Professor Northfield's name move this out of the realm of plagiarism. This situation, however, is ethically not much different from a student hiring another student to write a term paper. In both cases, the original and end products were not published and there was consent by the author, but plagiarism has nevertheless occurred.