WCRI 2019 - Day 2

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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I was sooo tired, that I slept in and missed the first session. Sorry about that.
I wanted to see talks in two sessions, natch, so I had to do a session hopping.

Session: Retractions Lydia Liesegang, a sociologist with the TU Berlin, Germany, spoke on "The impact of published incorrect scientific information on the knowledge production of scientific communities."

The talk was not actually about retractions, but about incorrect information.  She assumed that when people cite a publication, that they are using it to support an argument. That may be the general case, but I have cited things that are used as examples of bad science, and I am not alone, so I don't buy into this argument. She did a citation analysis of 30 problematic papers, finding 126 citing papers. The problematic papers were among those found by

Byrne, J.A. and Labbé, C. (2017) Striking similarities between publications from China describing single gene knockdown experiments on human cancer cell lines, Scientometrics 110(3): 1471-1493

(which is a fascinating reading in and of itself). 

There was some citation and propagation, but in conclusion she found that usually, incorrect information dies in the periphery. But such papers lead on the scientific community about possible rewarding research areas, so this could steer future research in the wrong direction and thus allocates resources to exhausted research areas.

I then switched to the

Session: Whistleblowers

The room was packed, I stood at the back with a number of people until the speaker switch happened and then squeezed myself into an empty space, climbing over many people.

"The 'Murky Waters' of questionable research practices" was presented by Johannes Hjellbrekke of the University of Bergen in Norway.  He conducted a survey for the Research Integrity in Norway (RINO) on  Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism (FFP) and Questionable Research Practices (QRP) that was distributed to 31 206 researchers at Norwegian universities.

They did find self-reported FFP and QRP and used a lot of statistics in the hopes of identifying a specific group that needs to have a whistle blown.  They defined three groups of researchers: The Ethical (82 %), The Generous (oops, we made a boo-boo, for example using gift authorship, not informing about limitations of a study, not whistleblowing on colleagues, 13 %) and The Murky (5 %). The Murky are the group at risk.

Overrepresented in the "Murky" waters were: Private research institutes, social science, postdocs, Researcher II [no idea what this is], Senior Researchers, 30-39 years age.

Underrepresented in the "Murky" group were: Humanities, PhD candidates, Associate Professors, 60-69 years of age.

He closed with an interesting statistical observation, based on the work of Abraham Wald (1943): Don't strengthen war airplanes that have been shot at where there are hits. Instead, strengthen where there are no hits, because we are looking at the ones that returned, not the ones that were shot down.

Fascinating was the next talk, by lawyer  John R. Thomas, Jr., Healy Hafemann Magee, Roanoke and his brother, biologist Joseph M. Thomas, "Perspective of the whistleblower." Joseph Thomas was the whistleblower in the case of US ex rel. Thomas v. Duke University, et al. in which the US Department of Justice sued Duke University and won $112.5 million in damages.

John Thomas sued under a quirky US American law called the False Claims Act or "Lincoln Law."  If you defraud the government, they can sue you. It is traditionally used in contracting law, and now more often in Medicare and Medicaid cases. In this case it was for research misconduct that occured while working on grants from the federal government. Qui Tam provisions allow private whistleblowers to bring suit on behalf of the US Government.  The suit is first sealed while the government investigates. If the government finds that the case has merit, they take over the suit. If they win, they recover triple damages and the whistleblower may recieve up to 30 % of the recovered amount.
More on the case in Science and the press release of the Justice Department.

During the discussion someone from Duke asked if this wasn't a bit too harsh, as such a ruling could bankrupt smaller universities. John Thomas answered that that is the point of the provision: the courts know that a lot of fraud goes on, so if one gets caught, they are severely punished in order to make the others decide to clean up their acts.

The session closed with epidemiologist Gerben Ter Riet, Amsterdam University Medical Center & Univ. Applied Sciences, Amsterdam speaking about his "Reflections of a passionate and almost excommunicated scientist."

He was doing his normal duties and teaching a course on the responsible conduct of research (RCR) as well as mentoring students. He became active in the RCR area and published a few papers (1 - 2), but was told by a new boss that he was not bringing in enough grants, so he should terminate his RCR activity and focus more on science.

He even managed to obtain a grant for research integrity in 2017, but that was when things exploded in his lab.  He tried to get help inside the system, but was stonewalled at every turn. He noted when reading the document that came out 5 weeks ago in the Netherlands that, except for the sexual harassment, it rather fit his case.

Harassment in Dutch Academia, Exploring manifestations, facilitating factors, effects and solutions.

Two of his colleagues have left academia, he has a nominal position at the university hospital with some doctoral students and is now teaching at a local college.

Plenary session: Perspectives for funding agencies in shaping responsible research practices  

Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of Research Management, Wellcome Trust, London, spoke about "Towards a more positive culture for Trust in research – a systems perspective." She introduced the Wellcome Trust and identified that there is a systemic problem in science.  She closed with the statement that change will not happen if we act alone.

Kylie Emery, from the Australian Research Council, Canberra, had "Simplifying and strengthening responsible research practice – the Australian experience as her title and showed the slides of the Australian research landscape, their framework, the focus on shared responsibility, the role of funders for the THIRD time. 

Qikun Xue, Vice President Tsinghua University, Beijing was supposed to speak, but he had to cancel at the last minute, so he sent a colleague who had the job of presenting a Powerpoint Karaoke on "Research integrity practice at Tsinghua University: Policies and Practice". 

Tsinghua University is a very large Chinese university with over 14 000 faculty and staff and over 36 000 students. There were the usual ideas for dealing with the topic: education and sanctioning. A few Chinese scandals from the university were mentioned:

• 2005: Faculty member Liu from the Medical School fabricated research and was dismissed
• 2009: Plagiarism in a postdoc's published papers was found and he was punished
• 2014: A final project report by another faculty member Liu in the Dept. Of Mechanical Engieering turned out to be identical to the proposal, no acutal research was conducted, he was sanctioned.
• 2017: Papers published by a graduated PhD student were self-plagiarizing, re-using images and fabricating experimental results. The PhD was revoked.

During the discussion the question was asked, it being the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, what the current state of academic freedom at the university is. The speaker appeared a bit flustered, but assured us that people at university are allowed to have different opinions.

I was frozen cold on account of the air conditioning being set so low, so I got some hot tea before I came back to the last lecture of the day.

Mark McMillan, Dept. Vice Chancellor for indigenous people and Aboriginal law at RMIT University, Melbourne, and a Wiradjuri man from Trangie, NSW, spoke about deep time (120 000 years ago) and Aboriginal ways of knowing in "Ethical and integrity dilemmas for engaging with humanity's oldest living knowledge system." I have no earthly idea what he was on about.

We then gathered for a boat ride to the conference dinner. I was happy to spend the time chatting with Tracey Bretag. We froze on the bus, then got out at the water and melted in the heat and rain for about an hour. It was decided that we couldn't get on the boat there, as the water was too choppy, so they had to re-order the busses to take us to another pier, where we were able to get on. The weather cleared up and we had a wonderful trip out to the old city airport that is now a cruise liner terminal. It has a restaurant that does not mind serving 1000 people at once. We were only 700, so that sounded good.

It was bit odd that the vegetarians were expected to sit together. Half of us did, the others stubbornly stayed seated with their meat-eating friends and significant others. We were looking forward to the eight-course meal that started off with white Chinese yams. Not to become my favorite, but okay, seven more to come.

Except that the next five dishes seemed to be more or less the same: mushrooms with something gooey, drowned in brown sauce and with the odd other vegetable stuck in. The "vegetarian shark fin soup" was so strange tasting, one vegetarian said it tasted like beef stock had been used as a basis, so the Indians rather went on strike. Then we each got a small bowl of rice with  few cucumbers sliced in, no sauce. For dessert there were two small squares of Jell-o. At least the wine was good.... As we left we saw piles and piles of noodles and rice on the other tables - that and a bit of sweet-and-sour sauce would have been wonderful!

We had a nice ride back, although Tracey and I rather got into an argument with an administrator from Canada who insisted that their university would punish students who reused more than four words in sequence without a reference. She wanted to know what software she should use to teach the students. I got ticked off about the text-matching software, as is not useful for that purpose, and Tracey insisted that the policy is crocked (it is!) and should be changed. We still have a lot of educating to do!

More to come on the last day of the conference!

WCRI 2019 - Day 1b

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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Quite refreshed from a long night's sleep and reluctant to venture out into the rain, here's the rest of Day 1 of the WCRI conference 2019!

Session: Principles and Codes 2

Daniel Barr, RMIT University, Melbourne
"Research integrity around the Pacific rim: developing the APEC guiding principles for research integrity"

They looked at integrity systems across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) area and collated a close consensus of guidelines:

• Research integrity systems appear diverse, multi-faceted and dynamic
• Principlies-based policies appear common, but are not uniform
• Limited coordination of institutions with some exceptions
• Varied roles in leading or influencing research integrity systems

They did a survey with 499 responses, but 85 % of the respondents were from Mexico, so they had to split their analysis on Mexico and not-Mexico. They also conducted a workshop with various participants. In honor of the memory of Paul Taylor they have developed the Draft APEC Taylor Guiding Principles for Research Integrity that are a top priority for avoiding breaches.

Honesty, Responsibility, Rigour, Transparency, Respect, Fairness, & Diversity

The topic of Diversity was a principle that came out of the workshop.

Natalie Evans was supposed to speak about "Research integrity and research ethics experiences: a comparative study of Croatia, the Netherlands, and Spain" but there was some planning mix-up so Jillian Barr took over and spoke about research integrity in Australia, which was a shame for me, because that is what she talked about at the pre-conference workshop.

Dr. Sonja Ochsenfeld-Repp has been Deputy Head of Division Quality and Programme Management, German Research Foundation, since 2016. She spoke about the new Draft Code of Conduct "Guidelines for safeguarding good scientific practice". The old white paper was first published in 1998 [as a reaction to a very large academic misconduct scandal, this was not mentioned], a revision is underway since 2017. 

I asked about how many researchers in Germany actually know about and understand these guidelines, she assured me that everyone does. My own experience shows that this is not the case, there are quite a number of university heads who are unaware of the procedures and guidelines set out, even if it is published on their own web pages. 

I spoke with another researcher afterwards who conducted an actual study investigating how many people did, indeed, know about and understand the guidelines. The results appear to be sobering, I'll see if I can get a hold of concrete results.

Sergey Konovalov, Russian Science Foundation, Moscow

Research ethics in Russia: challenges for the Russian Science Foundation

RSF has existed for 5 years now, but has less than 10% of the federal budget allocated for science. They audit the accounting of the grants: Business class instead of coach, fancy furniture for the bosses' cabin. They don't touch the scientific part, only if the expenses are related to the research.

I asked about Dissernet and if that shows that they need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. He says that they have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but the researchers are themselves responsible for the scientific correctness of what they research. I'm afraid that he doesn't understand my question.

Update 2019-06-18: Sergey writes: "Regrettably, I did not manage to answer your question about Dissernet and if that shows that we need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. Frankly speaking, Dissernet has nothing to do with the Russian Science Foundation activities as they check the the thesises and dissertations and we deal with the project proposals, which is somewhat different. 

Maybe, you missed the point that we do check not only financial part of the projects but also the scientific part (not by RSF staff but it is done by our expert council members), which is equally important to us.

We do not have much of plagiarism concerns but we strictly check the scientific acknowledgements (funding source should be properly indicated in the RSF-funded publications) and duplication of proposal contens submitted to RSF and other funding agencies [...]; these two scientific issues are in our view one of the most common examples of unethical behaviour of researchers in Russia. At least, in our experience (again, our programs cover only 10% of researchers and 15% of research organisations in Russia)."
Session: Predators

I am quite interested in the entire predatory publisher phenomenon, so I decided to attend this session, although there were at least two others in parallel with interesting talks. One was on Dissernet, the Russian plagiarism documenting group (but I know about them already) and the other one was a symposium on "Misdirected allegations of breaches of research integrity" with Ivan Oransky from RetractionWatch.

First up was Rick Anderson from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City with "Predators at the gates: citations to predatory journals in mainstream scientific literature". He identified some predatory journals that had published nonsense in sting operations and then took some papers from each of these journals. He then looked at citations to these papers in the Web of Science, ScienceDirect and PLOS. Yes, there were citations to some of these. I was a bit concerned that he didn't look at the papers themselves to see if they made sense, as misguided individuals will publish good science in bad places. 

Next was Donna Romyn, Athabasca University, St Albert, Canada (a virtual university) on "Confronting predatory publishers and conference organizers: a firsthand account".

She decided to attend a supposed predatory conference on purpose and to chart her journey. She submitted an abstract "At risk of being lured by a predatory publisher? Not me!". The paper was accepted within 24 hours, so there must have been rigorous peer-review done.... There was a bit of back and forth about her giving a keynote, she ended up with the exact same abstract but using a different title, "Safeguarding evidence-informed nursing practice from predatory publishers." She attended the conference and found about 60 people in attendance, many unaware of the nature of the conference. During the discussion the site thinkchecksubmit.org came up, it has a good checklist on what to look at before submitting a paper.

Miriam Urlings from Maastricht University, Maastricht, looked at "Selective citation in biomedical sciences: an overview of six research fields". She did a citation network analysis for papers in six focused research fields with around 100 relevant potential citations in order to see if there is citation bias. There were, however, only 1-2 citations for many of the publications and then highly cited ones in each area, so the results were not conclusive.

Eric Fong, University of Alabama, Huntsville (with Allen W. Wilhite) spoke on "The monetary returns of adding false investigators to grant proposals". He developed an interesting economic model for looking to see if adding false investigators (FI) to grant proposals increases the monetary value of total grants over a 5-year period. Then emailed 113.000 potential respondents and had a 9.5 % response rate. Their conclusion: if you add FI to your grants, you apply for more grants, but that does not lead to larger funding per grant application. However, adding FI significantly increases cumulative total grant dollars over a five-year period. 

Vivienne C. Bachelet, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), Santiago, spoke about the interesting problem of academics putting institutional affiliations on their bylines without actually being employed at the institution. "Author misrepresentation of institutional affiliations: exploratory cross-sectional case study on secondary individual data".

They focused on researchers giving a Chilean university as an affiliation for the year 2016 and tried to verify if the person was actually affiliated with the university. For around 40 % of the authors, it was not possible to verify their connection to the university. This private investigation, done with no funding, was commenced after it became known that one university in Chile was paying prolific, Spanish-speaking researchers, to add an affiliation with their university, presumably to increase some metric the university is measured by.

After this I attended the COPE reception. There was a lot of very good discussion there, and some publishers I had mentioned in my talk were very interested to hear more about my cases.

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A colleage (who wishes to remain unnamed) reported from a parallel session, here's her take on those presentations (edited to fit my format and fix typos):

Session: Prevention 1

Michael Kalichman, UC San Diego, San Diego
Research misconduct: disease or symptom?

He surveyed RIOs on their perceptions of cases, and got some data that research misconduct occurs in cases deficient in Good Research Practices (i.e. maybe what these courses really need to teach is record keeping).

He listed out 10 GPR or lackings and from ~30 RIOs (out of 60 emailed) what practices were in place in cases they had personally investigated. It’s to be expected, but very good talk.

Michael Reisig, Arizona State University, Phoenix
"The perceived prevalence, cause, and prevention of research misconduct: results from a survey of faculty at America’s top 100 universities."

He has a forensic background and corresponded with about 630 respondents about prevalence, causes, and prevention of research misconduct, and found ~50% people surveyed were very much in favor of formal sanctions to prevent future misconduct. 29 percent said that nothing works, and "30%” wanted an integrated approach. QRP pretty common. But the slides went too fast for numbers.

Sudarat Luepongpattana, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Thailand, Bangkok
"Research quality development of the Thailand National Science and Technology Development Agency"

Yet another survey, and found that researchers don’t really know that authorship entails.

Ignacio Baleztena, European Commission, Brussels
"National practices in research integrity in EU member states & associated countries"

I left during this. My understanding was that representatives from 14 countries were going to have meetings, and then more meetings, and then follow a flow chart of meeting and then produce a definition of research integrity. I was getting seriously jetlagged, but that’s the memory. I just don’t understand why we need YET ANOTHER document. Are there any rules of thumb for when these are useful? [This is an excellent observation. Everyone is producing their own documents (sometimes by gently plagiarizing other institutions documents) on academic integrity. But how do we breathe life into them, change the culture? --dww]

[She missed the last talk and went to another session. She caught the tail end of a survey on Finnish atttitudes toward QRP, who said that it was hard to find a definition of research integrity]

Session: Attitudes 3

De-Ming Chau, Universiti Putra Malaysia/Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences, Malaysia, Serdang
"Effectiveness of active learning-based responsible conduct of research workshop in improving knowledge, attitude and behaviour among Malaysian researcher"

He did a survey (small sample size) and found that researchers with more experience say they are more likely to “do nothing” if a colleague is engaging in research misconduct

He’s pretty impressive; an NAS grant got him started designing RCR in Malaysia, and the programs are being designed by early career researchers

WCRI 2019 - Day 0

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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I am currently attending the World Conference on Academic Integrity (WCRI 2019) in Hong Kong, sponsored by a travel grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). It is quite an international conference with over 700 attendees from all over the world, although of course given the location there are many Asia-Pacific countries represented. I will be blogging about the talks and workshops that I attend, which are only a small fraction of the talks held, as there are seven tracks in parallel. As usual, there is one paper in each track that I really want to hear, so I will have to flip three coins to see which session I attend.
The conference is being held at the University of Hong Kong, a large university of high-rises, terraces, and steep stairways nestled in between the skyscrapers of Western Hong Kong.

I attended two pre-conference workshops before the opening ceremonies.

1. How to investigate breaches of research integrity and research misconduct

The workshop was designed by Daniel Barr (RMIT Melbourne, Australia), Ton Hol (University of Utrecht) and Paul Taylor(†, formerly of RMIT) and there were around 50 participants. Three talks were held and there was some discussion.
In his introduction, Dan Barr proposed this definition of research integrity:

Research integrity is the coherent and consistent adherence to a set of principles that underpin the trustworthiness of research.

He noted that people are not consistent – they might behave well one month, and use questionable practices the next month. From this I take it that the focus should be on the research and thus the publication or non-publication itself, not on the person.

Ton Hall, head of the School of Law at the University of Utrecht, then spoke on handling allegations of research misconduct in the Netherlands. The Diederik Stapel case appears to have been quite a force in getting Dutch universities to focus on both preventing research misconduct as well as formalizing the investigative process.

He first looked into the reasons why an institution needs to deal with accusations of research misconduct. Above all, the public's trust in science should not be affected by faulty research. There are other reasons of course, not only giving satisfaction to the accuser, but also to protect the reputation of the institution and of the accused researcher, and of course to improve the local research practices. He then explained the difference between an accusatorial or an inquisitorial approach. That means, an institution can either respond to an allegation, or it can start investigations on its own.

He noted that complaints from anonymous accusers can be investigated if there are compelling public insterests or the factual basis can be investigated without additional input from the complaintant (for example in documented plagiarism cases).

Jillian Barr, Director Ethics and Integrity National Health and Medical Reserach Council Australian Government, then gave the view on investigating breaches from the view of an Australian funding agency. In 2018, Australia published a code of Responsible Conduct in Research. There are many additional guides published, among them one on investigating potential breaches of the code.

One of the most important aspects in convening a panel for investigating potential breaches is deciding who should be on the panel, as there are potential consequences for those involved. Which members of the department or other departments should be incuded, should there be external members, should they have prior experience with dealing with such issues, how well do they need to know the code, do they have to understand the relevant discipline, are there conflicts of interest or gender / diversity issues to be addressed? And of course, who should chair such a panel, someone with legal experience? Many questions and no easy answers.

Karin Wallace, from the Secretariat for the Responsible Conduct of Research in Canada, was up next. The body she represents sees plagiarism as one of the largest problems, as well as misrepresentation of credentials. However, each case is unique, so it is not easy to set up guidelines for sanctioning.

Investigation reports do not have names on them, so that the focus for the investigation committee is on the facts of the case, not the institution or person involved. She suggests having a standing investigation committee that is familiar with research integrity, with subject matter expertise filled in on an ad hoc basis. She cautions that external members should be familiar with research integrity procedures and be in close proximity, in order to facilitate their participation.

Finally, Chris Graf, from COPE and the Director of Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics at Wiley, gave us the point of view of the publisher in dealing with breaches of integrity. Wiley, a large scientific publisher, has a number of people working full-time on this topic. 

He noted that research publishers create and maintain the formal "version of record". When an error is identified, corrections are restricted to an equally formal set of permanent options: Corrections, experessions of concern, retractions, withdrawals. The latter is what he calls the "nuclear option" to be used when a paper must be deleted for legal reasons or other serious circumstances, however, the formal bibliographic information is left at the DOI. 

He presented some interesting numbers of the various types of case they handled in 2018 and 2019 to date:

58 Misconduct or Questionable behavior

45 Authorship

43 Data issues

34 Redundant or Duplicate publications

33 Plagiarism

30 Copyright

30 Correction of the literature

26 Legal issues

22 Consent for Publication

20 Questionable or Unethical Research

19 Mistakes

13 Conflicts of Interest

6 Peer review

5 Whistleblowers

5 Funding

4 Contributorship

3 Social Media

2 Editorial Independence

2. Workhop on "The Embassy of Good Science"

Guy Wissershoven opened the session by briefly explaining the project and the web site, which is not yet online. It seemed that about half of the room (also around 50 persons in attendance) was somehow involved in the project, I am not sure but it seemed to be funded by the EU. 

I found a short description on the web:

‘The Embassy of Good Science’ is a European initiative to make the normative framework informing research ethics and research integrity (RE+RI) easily accessible, share RE+RI knowledge and experiences, and foster active participation of the scientific community.
The development of The Embassy platform is underpinned by a stakeholder consultation, which consisted of a series of focus groups in three EU countries with diverse levels of research and innovation (The Netherlands, Spain and Croatia, n=59) and an online community discussion with participants from across Europe and beyond (n=52). Participants included researchers, editors, RE or RI committee members, policy-makers, and funders.

It is an excellent idea to collect up the information about research ethics and research integrity, as well as the various guidelines that exist into some sort of easy-to-use repository. I was intrigued by the idea that they want to provide a forum for discussion about cases and issues relating to research activity, but there was just a rudimentary implementation of tools to facilitate the discussion and no clear concept of how they will attract and retain interested persons to the discussions.

The project will be continuing until 2021, so I do hope that they acquire some deeper understanding of how to cultivate an active community.


Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony in the Grand Hall that looks like it easily seats 1000 people included the usual words of greetings. Then there were two talks given.

Guoqing Dai (Director-General of the Department of Supervision and Scientific Integrity, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the People's Republic of China, Beijing) spoke about his department, founded in 2018, and tasked with setting up concerted efforts for coping with new challenges for research integrity that have been identified in China. Multiple measures will be undertaken in China to promote research integrity:

1. Constantly improve the institutional arrangements
2. Trying to establish sound operational mechanisms
3. Strictly investigating and punishing breach behaviors (497 researchers were punished last year)
4. Strengthening the dissemination and education about research integrity (16 million students recieved instruction last year)
5. Deepening the reform of science and technology evaluation.

Alan Finkel, Australia's Chief Scientist, from Canberra, used a funny metaphor to describe the current scientific publication process with four million articles published every year: A bridge. What used to be perhaps a simple structure to connect A with B (the scientist with the reader) is now a triple-decker, multi-lane freeway. It's not about to collapse, but showing many signs of stress. The publication bridge must be kept open, but there are currently too many trucks with wrong cargo or contraband (there are over 20.000 retractions in the Retraction Watch database), or with useless cargo that no one wants. Some drivers speed madly in order to make as many trips as possible. There are smugglers (predatory publishers) and researchers jumping off the bridge into the wild waters of open science. 

He identified the biggest problem as the incentives. Systems adapt to follow the incentives, so the incentive system in academia must move away from counting publications and look to quality.  As an engineer he proposed a quality assurance initiative that includes mandatory research integrity training for all researchers (not just new ones) and some version of the Rule of Five (maximum of x publications in the last y years for values of x and y close to 5). There should be a "Publication Process Quality Assurance" seal that is positively awarded to journals, and grant-giving institutions should insist on publications only in these journals.

After this well-recieved talk, a Chinese "Lion's Dance" was presented, and then we were treated to some appetizers and a drink. It was lovely to meet old acquaintences and meet new people active in the field.

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Updated 2019-06-03 to include Karin Wallace's institution

News from the world of academic integrity

The school year is getting underway in the Northern Hemisphere, so there have been a number of links twittered or linked to in the past week that need linking:

• Radio Free Europe published an article by Alan Crosby: Montenegro Education Council Members Resign, Learn Lesson About Plagiarism. It seems their curriculum was plagiarized from the Croation one without reference. 
• In Australia the Daily Telegraph authors Chris Harris & Bruce McDougall report on a primary school teacher caught offering contract cheating: Cheating students on marketplace website offering to buy or sell work. It may seem that the practice of contract cheating is rather widespread in Australia, but I believe that is because there are researchers actively looking there. I did a quick search on eBay and found lots of offers and people looking for help in Berlin...
• Linked from another article I was reading was an article by Daniel Etchells from The Sport Digest from 2016 about South Korea: Moon Dae-sung Suspended as IOC Member Over Plagiarism. It seems that Moon, who had won an Olympic gold medal in Athens (2004) in taekwondo, had been awarded a doctorate in 2007 with a thesis on taekwondo. In 2014 Kookmin University rescinded his doctorate. Moon defended himself in the appeal, stating that he had the permission (!) of the author of the text he used to use it. 
• The Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan reported in June 2017 that there has been a record number of university students sanctioned for academic misconduct in 2016. There were a total of 33 universities questioned by the news agency TT, they reported 733 sanctions (an average of 2.5 per 1000 full-time equivalent students). In 2013 there were only 533 sanctions meted out. The increase in serious cases registered and sanctioned may be due to teachers doing more checking or getting better at discovering students who cheat on exams or plagiarize.

Keeping tabs on cheating

I tend to keep tabs open in my browser for weeks with interesting articles I want to explore in more depth. Then Firefox decides to update and crashes so miserably, that the tabs are gone. So I'll try to at least post them here. No promises that I can do this with any kind of regularity, like Retraction Watch does with its Weekend Reads.

• The Japan Times has an interesting article debunking an excuse typically used by students from the Far East: "Confcius made me do it." It seems that the difference between allusion and "literary theft" was well know many centuries ago.
  
  "If East Asian students and researchers plagiarize, it’s not because of some archaic cultural programming; it’s because modern institutional cultures tacitly condone plagiarism, or lack clear policies for explaining and combating it."
• In the New Scientist there was an interview with Shi-min Fang that published in 2012, who was awarded the Maddox prize for his work on exposing scientific misconduct in China.  It seems that there is a lot of controversy around his work.
• At the University College Cork in Ireland there was a spat about wide-spread contract cheating, as the Irish Times reports. Ireland is currently considering legislation to make advertising for or providing contract cheating services illegal.
• Down under, the weekly student newspaper of the University of Sydney, Australia,  Honi Soit reports that the university had considered using some anti-cheating software that was created by former University of Melbourne students, but have decided not to after a trial. The idea was to analyse typing patterns and use multiple login questions in order to make it harder for students to submit essays purchased from contract cheating sites. Some of the issues included the necessity to be connected to the Internet to write an essay, forcing students to write with this system and not the editor of their choice, and a massive invasion of privacy that includes tracking the locations of the users and comparing it with the location of their mobile phones. The software was felt to be impractical and invasive.
• Back in June the Daily Times reported that the doctorate of the prorector of the Comsats Institute of Information Technology has been revoked by Preston University.
• The former head of the Toronto school board lost his teaching certificate for plagiarism. According to The Globe and Mail, he has appealed the ruling and is willing to testify under oath about who helped him produce the plagiarisms.

Things leftover in tabs from 2016

Happy New Year!

I seem to have collected quite a number of interesting stories that are hanging around in my browser tabs. Let me just document some of them here.

• Serays Maouche reports in December 2016 in Mediapart in France about a plagiarism case that involves a person who is professor at the École Centrale Paris and a director at the Atomic Energy Commission. It involves plagiarism in a number of texts, among them a biography of Einstein. The institutions involved have nothing to say on the matters. Ms. Maouche closes with the question "Comment sanctionner des étudiants pour plagiat, si on accepte cette fraude académique pour des directeurs et des académiciens ?" (How can we sanction students for plagiarim when this academic misconduct is accepted by the administrations and academics?)
• It was reported be the Guardian in November that the results of one portion of the ACT exam, one used by US-American universities to determine admission for foreign students, has been invalidated for Asia-Pacific students. No details were available. 
• In Spain, el diario reported on November 21 and  November 23 about a plagiarism case involving the rector of a Spanish university. The Google translate version is not very clear, so I don't want to try and summarize it here, just give the links. 
• In October the Chinese Global Times wrote about a report in the "Southern Weekly" about Chinese scientists and medical practioners paying journals to publish ghostwritten articles so that they can obtain promotions. Springer has since retracted 64 publications and BioMed Central 43 for faking peer reviews. 
• Radio Free Asia reported on September 21, 2016 that students in Laos had to retake college entrance exams after more than 100 students obtained a perfect score on the social sciences part of the exam. Students are angry, as they will again have to incur traveling expenses in order to retake the exam.
• Donald McCabe, a prolific researcher from Rutgers Business School who focused on determining how prevalent academic misconduct is amongst pupils and students worldwide and on the use of academic honor codes to prevent misconduct, passed away at age 72 on Sept. 17, 2016. I was lucky to get to meet Don in 2012 when he gave a talk at our university and we drove together down to Bielefeld for a conference. He will be sorely missed.
• The Moscow Times reported on September 8, 2016 that Russian education officials  "have reportedly developed draft legislation that would make it possible to revoke a person's academic doctorate only after a copyright ruling by a court has come into effect. " Although copyright and plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct have little to do with each other, this is apparently in response to the documentation work of Dissernet, who have documented plagiarism in hundreds of dissertations, among them many submitted by politicians to Russian universities. 
• There was a flurry of publications about paper mills and the problem of contract cheating, that is, students paying someone else to do their work for them. In the UK the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education published a report on contract cheating in August. The chief operations officer at an essay mill then wrote a defense of his industry for the Times Higher Education which sparked quite a debate. Tricia Bertram Gallant, also writing in the THE, called on universities to fight contract cheating by openly discussing the topic with students. October 19 was declared the "International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating" and a number of institutions worldwide participated. 
• The Age reported in October about an inside job at the University of Melbourne in Australia where grades on a manually graded exam was changed after grading with a red pen by someone who had access to the exam papers. The university was unable to determine who was responsible for the change.
• Joanna Williams reported in June in the Times Higer Education about a survey on research misconduct in the UK.
• In July 2016 the USA issued a patent (US9389852) to Indian researchers on a method for determining "plagiarism" in program code from Design Patterns. That Design Patterns were explicitly meant to be copied appears to have escaped the Patent Office. 
• The blog iPensatori analyzed how Google Scholar gets filled up with junk.
• The Office of Research Integrity has put up some infographics on their site about research integrity. They also have a guide on avoiding self-plagiarism.
• And while I am on the subject, the 5th World Conference on Research Integrity will be held from May 28-31, 2017, in Amsterdam (I am on the program committee). The conference proceedings from the previous conference is available here. There will also be the 3rd International Conference Plagiarism In Europe and Beyond from May 24-25 in Brno, Czech Republic.  And no, there are no direct flights Brno-Amsterdam.
• On March 18, 2016 the German DFG announced sanctions against an unnamed researcher who will be barred from applying for financing for three years.

Chinese students in Australia use ghosting service

The Sydney Morning Herald and Western Australia Today are reporting on a Sydney company called MyMaster that is offering ghostwriting services to Chinese students enrolled in Australian universities. I've collected the links and the first paragraphs of the articles here. It is excellent to see such widespread reporting on academic misconduct.

• WA's Curtin University caught in NSW 'essay writing' scandal
  "Western Australia's Curtin University has been caught up in a cash-for-results scandal involving thousands of students who paid a Sydney company up to $1000 each to write essays and assignments for them, as well as sit online tests." The article has links to other articles on grade changing scandals.
• Students enlist MyMaster website to write essays, assignments
  "Thousands of students have enlisted a Sydney company to write essays and assignments for them as well as sit online tests, paying up to $1000 for the service. Their desire to succeed threatens the credibility and international standing of some of our most prestigious institutions."
• Students buying assignments online could be charged with fraud
  "Students who pay essay writing services to complete their university assignments are not only breaching university plagiarism protocols but could also be charged with fraudulent conduct under NSW [New South Wales] legislation, legal experts say."
• Yingying Dou: The mastermind behind the University essay writing machine
  "At the helm of the company embroiled in a large-scale academic cheating scandal is a Chinese-born businesswoman named Yingying Dou. The enterprising 30-year-old, who also goes by 'Serena', has used her accounting degree to build a lucrative ghostwriting service, called MyMaster, aimed at Chinese international students."
• Yingying Dou takes the day off as students and tutors tell of others who cheat
  "Tutors and students at Yingcredible Tutoring, the coaching college run by the mastermind of essay-selling website MyMaster, Yingying Dou, have spoken of the widespread practice of international students paying for university essays as they struggle with language barriers."
• Universities in damage control after widespread cheating revealed
  "NSW universities are in damage control following a Fairfax Media investigation that revealed hundreds of students across the state were engaging the services of an online essay writing business.
  On Wednesday, the Herald exposed an online business called MyMaster, run out of Sydney's Chinatown, that had provided more than 900 assignments to students from almost every university in NSW, turning over at least $160,000 in 2014."

The site has now been taken offline.
Thanks to Sven for spotting these articles!

Short links

Here are some diverse and interesting links from the world of academic misconduct:

• Research misconduct in Australia: The article in Mark Israel's Blog "The Conversation" lists a number of cases of research misconduct that have been made public in Australia, including a recent one at the University of Queensland.
  "Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood resigned from the University of Queensland in 2013 after a whistleblower claimed that they had not undertaken an experiment on Parkinson’s, despite reporting results in various journals. [...] The university failed to find any evidence that the experiment had been conducted. Instead, it discovered duplicate publication, statistical error and misattribution of authorship."
• The new president of the German "Federation of Expellees" organization, (Bund der Vertriebenen), Bernd Fabritius, is originally from Romania (he belongs to the German minority there) and did his doctorate in Hermannstadt/Sibiu and in Tübingen. A fascinating 54-page documentation of text parallels and other problems with this thesis was published recently online.
  
  
  The text was photographed using pens to mark the text and then boxes and explaining text were added to the pictures. A discussion of the documentation (in German) can be found in the Blog Erbloggtes.
• The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Germany considered awarding former Minister of Education Annette Schavan (who was found to have plagiarized in her dissertation) the Leibniz medal which is given in honor of outstanding service for the promotion of the goals of the Academy („zur Ehrung besonderer Verdienste um die Förderung der Aufgaben der Akademie“). Apparently, though, there was no unanimous vote, and the discussion leaked its way into the newspapers. There is also more biting commentary on the research group "Zitat und Paraphrase" (quotation and paraphrase) in the Causa Schavan blog ([1] - [2], in German)
• Dr. med. plagiat: The German newspaper Handelsblatt has an extensive report on the plagiarism scandal in medicine at the University of Freiburg, the University of Münster and the Charité. 
• There is a call for papers out (abstract submission deadline: November 16, 2014) for an international conference on plagiarism at the Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic 10 - 12 June 2015 "PLAGIARISM ACROSS EUROPE AND BEYOND" (http://plagiarism.cz/ Disclosure: I am on the program committee).
  
• I found an IFQ report (in German) from 2006 on the history of doctorates in Germany with some interesting statistics on the prevalence of doctorates in various fields.
• It seems that Elsevier has been charging 30$ for copies of book chapters that consist only of one page containing the wording "This page intentionally left blank". A tongue-in-cheek systematic review has been published, and indeed, if one googles "This page is intentionally left blank" together with "site:http://www.sciencedirect.com" there are 55 hits across a wide spectrum of fields. Apparently, the automatic publishing system has trouble with blank pages, or else the blank pages were not caught during the rigorous peer review.
• Widely off topic: There is even a Lego figurine for a university graduate in a cap & gown.