Plagirism again, please join the discussion on research gate

[Detmar Meurers]

Dear Shalom and colleagues,

> Sorry, this is not a good argument.
> 
> Even when one has very strong evidence that a crime has been
> committed, one is obligated to follow the procedures of due process.
>
> This should not be controversial.

for criminal cases this is not controversial. But, as also is apparent
from the post of Monica Lau that just arrived, it is too simple to
just equate plagiarism with criminal offenses. 

For plagiarized *dissertations*, there is a process, generally
involving the university where the dissertation was accepted. But even
there, the most common way I know of for collecting and discussing the
evidence for plagiarism is fully public:
http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/%C3%9Cbersicht

For plagiarized published articles, such as the case Stefan raised, it
is much less clear where one would even file a complaint and on what
legal basis. One can contact the publisher (or "publisher" in the case
of GRIN or the oxbridgewirters.com case that John Nerbonne mentioned
in a message that bounced from the list, included below), but as the
discussion here has shown, they often will do nothing or at most take
down the plagiarized article. If the "author" of the article happens
to be employed, contacting the employer is an option, but it is far
from clear whether procedures for such complaints at the level of a
plagiarized article are in place. How many such cases have we heard
of, if any? So does that mean there are no plagiarized articles in our
field, or that plagiarism in our field is not of interest to our
research community? No, as far as I see, there is no system in place
that ensures that plagiarizing in an article publication has
consequences and becomes known to the community, so that the
plagiarized articles aren't cited and don't contribute to the
scientific standing of the "author".

In contrast, who is in charge of conducting peer reviews and writing
public reviews about other publications? It is the research community
who takes care of that - so every one of us. So we ARE in the business
of judging work in linguistics based on the evidence presented to us.
In that light, Stefan Müller's analysis of the publication of Carmen
Cayetana Castro Moreno pointing out that it consists almost entirely
out of verbatim copies of five other publications, as far as I see, is
doing exactly what the research community has to do - with the
evidence transparently being provided at:
http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/~stefan/Plagiarism/TYPOLOGICA_CarmenCastro.pdf

But instead of then discussing the apparently quite real challenge of
plagiarized articles in linguistics, I'm astonished that we instead
see the victim of the plagiarism, making this act against him and the
community public, having to defend his reputation, gender balance, etc
- isn't that absurd?!

Best,
Detmar


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Nerbonne <j.nerbonne at rug.nl>
To: "Arnold, Doug" <doug at essex.ac.uk>
Cc: HPSG-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:04:36 +0200
Subject: Re: Plagirism again, please join the discussion on research gate
Hi all,

Just to add to the list:  one of my grad students discovered that a paper
we'd co-authored was being used as an example of the material that
"Oxbridges Writers" could produce (http://www.oxbridgewriters.com/) for a
good price!  It was 10 pages on working with old maps, more than 50% simply
cut and pasted.

I reported this to my university and also complained to the company.  The
company never answered the mail but took the paper off their site, and my
university didn't find it worthwhile to follow up on it, which annoyed me,
as they assert a right to my intellectual products. But I also didn't
follow up on it otherwise.

And then there was an M.A. student who simply listed himself as a co-author
on some of my publications.  He got caught in an application procedure.
 And an ex-staff member who listed a Science publication among his
publications, which I caught in a performance review.

I think 90-95% of us are honest and a bit baffled to discover that there's
lots of blatant dishonesty wrt publications. We've had several major
scandals in social psychology (1) and medicine (2) in the Netherlands. No
idea how much really exists. Try to get recall stats on that one, from IR
colleagues!

A fun read on one major such incident is Evgenij Samuel Reich's "Plastic
Fantastic" about Hendrik Schön's run of made-up breakthroughs at Bell Labs
in the 90s. According to a colleague in Physics, Schön was being discussed
as a (future) Nobel prize candidate for his work on organic semiconductors.
 Pure fabrication, not plagiarism, however.

Regards,

John


On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Arnold, Doug <doug at essex.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues
>
> I had not come across GRIN before this email thread started. I must say I
> think it is a very bad thing, and we should do what we can to discourage
> its use.
>
> First, I'm disappointed that you have to pay for on-line access to content
> deposited with them -- surely this goes against the whole idea of open
> access? (and surely it makes it much harder to check for plagiarism).
>
> Second, as Susanne says, how do they justify taking money for what is
> essentially similar to places like research gate? As far as I can see, the
> only thing they offer over and above things like research gate is the
> possibility of purchasing printed copies.
>
> Am I missing something?
>
> Best
> Doug
>
> On 31 Mar 2014, at 10:30, S. Hackmack <hackmack at UNI-BREMEN.DE> wrote:
>
> > Having been in a situation completely similar to Stefan's a few weeks
> ago, I would like to address the problem of GRIN, i.e. the publishers of
> the work in question. After chancing upon the plagiarized version of a
> paper of mine in GRIN's catalogue I contacted both GRIN and the University
> (LMU Muenchen), where, according to the author, he had handed in said work
> as a 'Seminararbeit'. Having become suspicous, I checked further work of
> the author and found more instances of plagiarism, for example in his
> MA-thesis which he'd copied in large parts from a 'Diplomarbeit' that had
> been online for two years prior to his work. Again, I notified GRIN and the
> LMU. As concerns the LMU, the department in question seems to take no
> measures whatever to secure against plagiarism: if you google the title of
> the plagiarized work, that paper of mine is the very fist hit you get
> offered (at least here in Germany). As concers GRIN, they were very
> apologetic and took all of the author's work (about 12 titles) down. But
> this does not mean that you cannot access these works anymore, for the
> internal workings of online publishing and bookselling (Amazon / Abebooks /
> ZVAB (an online antiquarian booksellsers) / Amazon Marketplace etc) cannot
> prevent that some copy somewhere will be up for sale. Now if a student
> researched some topic, he or she may find the content of the book on
> Amazon's 'Look Inside'. Even if he or she cannot order a copy from Amazon
> anymore, the book may still be available at one of the many other dealers.
> When I wrote to GRIN to question their business model and to ask them how
> they justify taking 12,99 EURO (for the PDF-version, a printed copy is more
> expensive) for putting something online that they actually do nothing with
> in terms of editing, checking etc., they argued that this was a sort of
> crass exception, but of course this is rubbish: they cannot possible know
> this - because they don't check. I am writing this to stress the need to
> discuss this point and this kind of publishing house with students, for
> they, too, may be duped. I feel sorry for sincere authors that do use GRIN
> in good faith and believe in GRIN's blurb concerning the 'advancement of
> science', but in my opinion GRIN (and others of the same ilk) ought to be
> shunned.
> > Best regards
> > Susanne Hackmack

-- 
John Nerbonne                University of Groningen
www.let.rug.nl/nerbonne     +31 (0)50 363 58 15