I wish I had something more substantive to add, but, all I can say is I hope your colleague knows that even if the swindlers and plagiarizers take our research, years of our lives, etc, be they in China or wherever the whole wide world else ain't able to take away the heart of a real one. They know the research ain't theirs, and they know they depend on real producers to be able to commit their crimes, or do anything actually useful and it's not the other way around. These plagiarists are parasites, and one day we'll be free of them.
As long as metrics like impact factor and citation count determine the trajectories of academic careers, plagiarism, collusion, and other forms of academic dishonesty will not go a way.
The fact of the matter is that most academics do not have time to dig into whether someone's work is intellectually dishonest. Being dishonest has a huge payoff as long as you don't cause a scandal.
Anyone who plans to stay in academia should understand that the metagame has changed over the last 50 years. Largely because human attention has not scaled with rate at which academics are exposed to and expected to assimilate new information. There is a larger payoff to exploiting the lack of attention than to earnestly carrying out some meaningful research program. At the very least, do both. By no means do only the latter.
I used to be enamored of academia and its promise. I am now glad there are increasing avenues for success for researchers who choose to leave it, given the limits of their capability to express their ideas honestly with the hope of being recognized for valuable work.
There are metrics and citations being taken, of our dishonest acts. They determine the trajectories of virtually everything relevant to our lives, and can have momentous impacts on the lives of others. I cannot judge any other man or woman, but I know I would be a coward, a fool, and a fraud to diversify any kind of portfolio of mine in this life, by consciously choosing to sprinkle in some exploitation or lies.
I should have been clearer. If you want to stay in academia, not debasing yourself comes at a high cost in terms of your career. It is better to leave than to debase yourself.
Academia is a system worth destroying. Participate in its destruction. Leave. There are so many exciting opportunities to continue doing meaningful work outside of universities and research institutes.
Now there's a system worth destroying.
Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server.
This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think this makes sense anyway. Peer review & editing from journals made a lot more sense in the world where physically publishing, printing & distributing papers made out of atoms was expensive and difficult. And where retractions and corrections were near impossible, and where we didn't have systems for tracking reputation.
More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community.
It won't be perfect, but neither is the current system. And speaking as a mostly independent researcher, the idea of signing over copyright of my work for the privilege of putting my work on their website is preposterous.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the kind of corruption described here.
That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. I think one of the basic functions of peer review is to provide a basic authoritative quality filter to help make the fire-hose manageable. As someone who lacks the infinite time needed to check everything myself, I find those kinds of filters valuable.
Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
IIRC, the current peer review system was created because academic specialization and the quantity of papers increased mid-century to a point where the pre-WWII system became unworkable. Specialization and volume have continued to increase, and it's hard to see how that makes the old system workable again.
We called it Assembl Chronos. It’s now available here at https://provenance.cerebrum.com. Please give it a try, I’d love to hear your thoughts :)
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I'm trying to understand your story because many details are very different from the things I know about scientific publishing.
Your colleague was a grad student who researched and conducted an experiment in a new field without a supervisor (you say there wasn't a coauthor with enough research cloud)? This never happens in my field and pretty much any technical field I'm aware of.
It then went to the review process and was rejected six month later because a reviewer found (a "copy" of) the paper on arxiv? And the rejection reason was lack of novelty? In many fields arxiv does not count as a "already published" . In particular if the submission date of the article is before the article showing up on arxiv.
Also you say the article on arxiv was very obviously copied. So did this result in plagiarism investigations? While there are many things wrong with the current review process, accusations of instances of plagiarism are typically dealt with very quickly and in my experience pretty much always results in the editors in chief getting involved. So did this happen? Also in my experience there is generally much more scepticism against chinese authors than western authors when this happens. The quality of research and publications from China has dramatically increased in the last 5-10 years though.
I clearly pointed out some gaps in the story that everyone vaguely familiar with scientific publishing would find, that's why I'm asking for clarification.
A supervisor can easily not have "enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft". If you're a tenured professor from a random university in a random country and are not among the top few names in your field, you probably can and will supervise theses, but good luck convincing an editor from an elite institution to care about you.
And in your last two paragraphs, I think you're being a bit naive... what if the editor in chief is directly involved, or is a friend of the plagiarizer? Whom do you turn to? How do you prove that you did the experiment first if there is no proof but the submission, which is in control of the editor in chief?
I fortunately have never been the victim of such a despicable ploy, but I have seen all sorts of malpractice in journals, including editors that didn't care about blatant plagiarism. I don't think it's a predominant thing, fortunately there are plenty of honest journals and honest editors. But it happens. I'm quite familiar with scientific publishing, having authored a good number of papers, and I find the story perfectly believable.
I don't care how many graduate students you have, there is no way all of that is original research. And in my case, it was an obfuscated version of a very well known theory that any freshman would know.
It's easy to complain about China but that's what the Mainland Chinese system is designed to do. If they're able to break ours then that's just survival of the fittest. Adopt of perish. Who says you have to roll over and simply let them get away with it? Why are our universities collaborating with these "researchers"? Name, shame and blacklist them.
US intelligence reports that researchers from the virology lab in Wuhan were hospitalized with an unknown illness in November of 2019, most notably before the "patient #0" was infected.
More research is necessary, but it's worth keeping your mind open to new evidence.
Are her social media accounts now empty shells run by the state to pretend she is still around?
Her history is spooky. And there is no evidence she is still alive.
Her wikipedia page seems sterile, and searching her name doesn't bring up anything about possible death.
In my own amateur opinion, either natural crossover or laboratory escape theories are plausible but we'll almost certainly never be able to prove it either way.
Also, a DMCA request to arXiv would likely work.
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
Could you clarify whether the duplicate paper was also submitted to the same journal or elsewhere, and if submitted whether it was accepted?
I'm trying to figure out whether the point was to steal credit, or to spike your colleague's submission.
> We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming.
Yeah this is the sort of thing that seems to only ever get resolved if a public stink is made, often on social media these days, because the integrity of both the editor and the journal is being implicated, which ends up with the can of worms[0] being swept under the rug if at all possible.
Of course people are going to keep tripping over the bump in the rug, and your colleague might not even have been the first victim.
[0] Having to check everything else the editor has ever done for similar misconduct, potentially retractions galore, making victims whole, process improvements, etc.
I wonder if it's worth staring a web-site where friendly scientists put papers side by side and say 'Was this a Rip Off'? Whereby at least the scammers get some form of possible public shaming for as long as the paper exists.
I can just imagine that site coming up in web searches ... how could people not click it?
I have no experience in this area, and I am probably going to ask a dumb question: why not always submit the paper to arXiv before submitting it to a journal to protect against this kind of theft? Wouldn't that clearly and indisputably establish priority?
This is so unfair, some cheaters from China got free research papers to their name and the legit author had to waste two years of their life
Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities.
We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. My colleage switched research directions to avoid the collusion and now takes pains not to submit papers without a coauthor who has enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft. He also avoids dealing with editors from institutions in China.
He ended up graduating two years later than planned.