German DFG and Research Assessment

Björn Brembs has translated his Laborjournal article about research assessment at the Germin Research financing body DFG into English:
Research Assessment, New Panels, New Luck?

How will disillusioned researchers, who may have had high hopes for DORA/CoARA, react if the institutions’ voluntary commitments ultimately turn out to be mere signal politics without consequences? The efforts to modernize research assessment, as described above, are based on the evidence that the race to submit more and more publications to the highest-ranking journals rewards unreliable science and punishes reliable science [7]. The elimination of the number of publications and the reputation of the journals from research assessment, the logic goes, would also eliminate significant drivers of unreliable science.  

[7] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.201800037/full

Plagiarism scandal at the University of St. Gallen

The Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ) started the ball rolling on October 9, 2022 (p. 23) with an article in the printed newspaper about plagiarism accusations concerning a business school professor at the prestigious University of St. Gallen (HSG). A Titularprofessor (that is, a person who has sucessfully submitted their habilitation—the second doctorate—, but without tenure and often without a salary) was accused of plagiarism in his dissertation that had been submitted to the TU Darmstadt in Germany. The NZZ had requested that Stefan Weber investigate the thesis, he later published some of his findings on his blog, Plagiatsgutachten. The TU Darmstadt has been deliberating since February 2022 about the case. 

The professor, currently in charge of an institute at the HSG, had faced similar charges about his habilitation submitted to the HSG. Students had found the text similarity and informed the university back in August 2021, but an investigative committee did not find academic misconduct. 

Early in December 2022 more issues turned up. The professor lists over 400 publications to his name, but as the St. Galler Tagblatt/Appenzeller Zeitung reported on December 5, 2022 (p. 21), quite a number of the publications that have the professor as first author are acutally theses by HSG students. The AZ contacted a number of these students for comments. One noted that he found it strange that the professor was so insistant on publishing his master's thesis, and was irritated that the professor's name was on it, although it was completely the student's own thesis. 

The AZ manged to obtain a dozen theses that they could compare with the professor's publications. Indeed, they were practically the same. 

According to the ethical codex of the HSG, this is not permissible. Students are not to be ghostwriters for professors. Interviewed professors from the HSG who did not want to be named, noted that this might be typical, as the number of publications is used as an indicator of researcher quality, but that it was a very questionable practice. The professor was unavailable for comment.

On December 7 the St. Galler Tagblatt interviewed some students on p. 18 and quoted the rector as saying the similarity between the dissertation and the habilitation of the professor was not as extensive as the lawyer who was representing the students had stated in August 2021. He also stated that the external examiners had found no plagiarism at all. 

And of course, by now all the rest of the media in Switzerland was banging on about the story.

On December 9, the St. Galler Tagblatt included not only a front-page article, but also a large report on p. 22 and two letters-to-the-editor on p. 33. They had interviewed Stefan Weber, and the rector of the HSG had published an article on its home page in the form of an interview. The rector noted that they had looked at the habiliation and even used Turnitin, but of course since it was a cumulative habiliation there was much similarity found to the original papers. 

On December 10 the rector was interviewed by the St. Galler Tagblatt and admitted that he had himself not even looked at the habilitation, and tried to excuse not having contacted the students who got the ball rolling because he didn't know who the students were. But he now wanted to speak to Weber. A lawyer for the students later noted that their names of the students where of course known, something the rector later had to concede was correct, as letters existed showing that the names were, indeed known. The lawyer noted that the case would have to be investigated even if the names were not known.

Things get really wild on December 12: Another professor at the HSG who had advised the first professor during his habilitation and had himself done his first and second doctorate in Darmstadt, wrote a threatening letter to students of the HSG. The letter, appearing to speak for the university, threatened the students. They must stop talking to the press or they will face civil and criminal lawsuits. Of course, this letter made it to the newspaper and it now appears to be an all-reporters-on-deck case. The St. Galler Tagblatt dug up an IT consultancy company that lists both professors as members of the board. Both have published papers together, including ones that were part of the habilitation at the HSG, meaning that the one professor should not have been the advisor for the habilitation of the other, as he can be considered to be biased. The NZZ dug up another company that appears to have diverted funds from the HSG into the company's account.   

The university held a public meeting on December 12 with students, staff, and administrators. The students are angry, because when their work is found to have plagiarism in it, they are harshly punished. The rector makes it clear that the university will not try to keep people from speaking to the press. He promised to make progress on clearing up all the issues as fast as possible, but warns that it won't be before Christmas. 

I can barely keep up with all the news. The NZZ published a summary of the situation today, December 14, including references to all sorts of scandals the HSG has had in the past years: copy&paste in reports about theses, fudged expenses, professors having to step down from company boards because of scandals there, market manipulations, and an instructor convicted for economic crimes. We'll see how this spins out!

Germany's problem with academic integrity

This blog post at ICAI by Sebastian Burkholdt with a student perspective on academic integrity from a German student in the USA just nails it: 

Of course, we were not allowed to cheat in school and university in Germany, and the consequences could have been as severe as they can be at American institutions, but I don’t remember ever having had an explicit conversation with a German teacher or professor about how to be academically honest. There was no academic honesty policy, no Office of Academic Honesty, and no official institutional process for dealing with academic misconduct at my university—at least not that I was aware of—and I never had any formal education about cheating and how to avoid it beyond learning how to correctly cite sources. It was just expected to know how appropriate academic conduct looks like.

Exactly. That is the problem here in Germany. Despite the plagiarism scandals involving politicians, there is very little discussion here about academic integrity. The universities perhaps purchase software and offer a course or two about proper citation. Some universities have writing clinics, but that is about the size of it. Deep and continuous conversations about good academic practice are seldom. Still, I'll keep trying to drag Germany into such conversations!

 

Bored? How about documenting plagiarism?

So you are all stuck at home with the Corona virus and have already binge-watched 15 series. How about contributing to cleaning up the academic world? Not all of us have the biomedical chops to debunk a supposed cure, like Elisabeth Bik writing in her Science Integrity Digest: Thoughts on the Gautret et al. paper about Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin treatment of COVID-19 infections.

How about some plagiarism documentation? The German platform VroniPlag Wiki that I have been working with since 2011 has so many unfinished cases and I know, the platform tends to be in German. The most recent documentation is in English: A recent dissertation (2017) from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Ids. From the executive summary:

The investigation has documented extensive plagiarism in the thesis. Over 90% of the pages of the main text contain plagiarized passages. Over two-thirds of the main text is taken almost verbatim from other sources, generally without any or the proper reference. The passages are taken from around 100 mostly online sources. Among these sources are the Wikipedia, a doctoral dissertation available online, a master's thesis, some organizational home pages, many open access publications, and various online religious reference works. The published PDF of the dissertation contains many copy-and-paste artefacts such as numerous hidden (embedded) web links that are also found as visible links in the source material. In conclusion, the dissertation could be categorized as an outright collage of easily obtained and quite diverse sources.

Drop in to the weekly chat Mondays at 21:00 MESZ (UTC +2), we'll be glad to help you get started. No specialized knowledge necessary, we'll be glad to show you the ropes, and there are plenty of English-language cases still unfinished.

Plagiarism around the world

I've just realized that I didn't get the promised ENAI posts done in June. I'll see if I can scratch something together. In the meantime, a few plagiarism links I've got saved in tabs:

• Plagiarism in work of departing Dean Dymph van den Boom
  The University of Amsterdam reported in June 2019 that an interim dean's public address and parts of her thesis have been found to have been plagiarized. 
• Kenyatta University Revokes Lecturers PhD For Cheating
  A recent PhD grantee who was lecturing at Kenyatta University was found to have plagiarized the thesis of a Nigerian don. It appears that the don himself discovered the plagiarism. 
• The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports (in German) that the Serbian Minister of Finance is charged with plagiarism in his dissertation granted by the University of Belgrade. The university was reluctant to deal with the situation, but the plagiarism is apparently so clear that students have been protesting, insisting that the university take up a proper investigation and publish the secret report. The university has reluctantly agreed to a November 4, 2019 date of publication. The minister himself, the NZZ wryly notes, doesn't seem to care. He participated in the Berlin Marathon last week, putting down his name as "Dr. Mali".
• "Inspiration" or plagiarism? Journal du Geek reports (in French). Apparently, a French comedian is using copyright to take down video reports on what some say is plagiarism, but he insists is just inspiration or "the spirit of the times". 

I gave a talk at the Leibniz Institute's PhD Network Day in Potsdam last week and spoke with a great bunch of PhDs about power hierarchies and academic misconduct. Two students from the Research Center Borstel told me that the institution has really gotten proactive about good academic conduct after the scandals there (see 1 - 2 - 3). They have orientation for new PhDs on good academic conduct, and insist on half-yearly reviews. They have a published plan, but I can only find it in German, their web site doesn't properly redirect to the translated pages.

Update: Just as I finished, another one dropped in by way of ENAI (European Network of Academic Integrity): Mr. Rinat Maratovich Iskakov has published a documentation that demonstrates that the dissertation of the Vice Minister of Education and Science of Kazakhstan is plagiarized The analysis is published on a Google Docs document. The first half of the document is the original and the second half is in English, translated by Ali Tahmazov. Apparently, the Polish plagiarism detection software StrikePlagiarism was used:

Анализ проверки диссертационной работы Жакыповой Ф.Н. на соискание ученой степени доктора экономических наук проведено с помощью системы StrikePlagiarism компании Plagiat.pl

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

News from around the world

Again, just a few links to interesting topics from around the world.

• There has been a case of a Belgian sociologist at the KU Leuven festering since 2017, according to Google Translate's version of a Dutch Wikipedia article. He has apparently re-published papers of other researchers and published work of co-workers that was not yet published. According to an article in De Standaard from 23 April 2019, he resigned his position as head of the "Center for Political Science" in 2018, but remains a full professor at the university.
• The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) has finally investigated cases of academic misconduct, mostly plagiarism, in 27 master't theses from universities of applied sciences, according to YLE, the Finnish broadcasting body. Most of them contained clear plagiarism. Dr. Erja Moore (author of the blog "Plagiointitutkija" in Finnish) chose the theses more or less at random from the open access thesis repository, investigated them, prepared documentation, and informed the universities in question of the problems. TENK Secretary General Sanna Kaisa Spoof has stated that the situation is serious and worrying. Dr. Moore will be presenting her results at the ENAI (European Network for Academic Integrity) "Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond" Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, June 19-21, 2019.
• VroniPlag Wiki just published a documentation (in German) of text parallels found in the doctoral dissertation of the current German Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Franziska Giffey. The press has been reporting on this since they "discovered" the work-in-progress in February 2019.

Links

Links galore!

It seems like time is passing so quickly and I never get around to posting the links that have been collecting as tabs in my browser. So I'm cleaning out my tabs, here's the first round of links:

• Top Chinese politicians have been found to have plagiarized in their PhDs, report the Hong Kong Free Press and Digital Journal. 
• The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel had to admit that one of their prize-winning journalists, Claas Relotius, was actually fabricating or embellishing his stories. They published a list of the fabricated stories, as then
  The story broke when two residents of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, USA began fact-checking the story Relotius published about the town: "And yet, he reported on very little actual truth about Fergus Falls life. In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search."
• A Houston-based company that sold completed assignments primarily to Chinese-speaking students in Australia and New Zealand has settled out of court in New Zealand: Case described in Stuff, settlement at Radio New Zealand. The company is still in existence, because what they do is not (yet) illegal in many countries. The Times Higher Education published an article in March 2019 on the problem, identifying international students as the problem, although in the interview with Tracey Bretag she makes it clear that it is not a problem with international students per se, but with students who do not have the language skills necessary to do university work.   
• There's a app for that - Quarz reports that in South Korea ghostwriters can be hired by app.

There will be more to come!

Let's just turn off the Internet!

One of the more bizarre posts in my Twitter feed the past few days was this one from India:

To avoid fake candidates and cheating, district administration will ban internet services in Udaipur on 14^th and 15^th July

This is apparently not the first time this has happened, the Times of India reported on December 14, 2017 that mobile internet services had been suspended because of "a possibility of disturbance of communal harmony." This seems to be a rather regular occurence, as Medianama reported the same thing in 2015. Seems to be rather extreme measures. Perhaps they need the exams to be taken in smaller groups with more proctors instead of turning off the Internet for the general population.

The Economist dug deeper and found that in Mauritania and Algeria the Internet was turned off in the entire country during high school leaving exams this year. Iraq, Uzbekistan and Ethiopia have apparently been doing this for years.  

In other news:

• Teachers, students and a headmaster have been sentenced to up to five years in jail for enabling cheating on high school exams in Dakar, Senegal, according to Agence France-Presse, as published in the Daily Mail. 
• In South Africa, students who are caught cheating or given failing grades are resorting to violence against their teachers, according to The Witness. Teachers are complaining that their administration is not backing them up.
• A long article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German) from June 2018 discusses the sorry state of medical dissertations in Germany. 
• A study in Czechia looks into the contract cheating market and finds that 8 % of survey respondents admit to having enganged in contract cheating.  
• The Independent reports that an artificial "intelligence" classifier was used in the UK in order to "detect" cheating at an English exam in 2014. Many international students were determined to have cheated and were often deported without a chance to defend themselves. Later testing determined that the algorithm had a 20 % false positive rate - that is, one in five persons found "guilty" were actually innocent.

Tip of the hat to Thomas Lancaster for his great Twitter feed on contract cheating!

Various Links

I must have about a dozen tabs open with things I want to post, but no time to comment. So here goes, a May Day collection:

• Nature reported back in February 2018 about researchers in South Korea helping their children or underage relatives to get into university by adding them as co-authors to their papers. 
• Prishtina Insight published a detailed article in February 2018 in English about a VroniPlag Wiki case (Ama) involving a professor from Kosovo who had studied in Bremen.  
• The Guardian reports in April 2018 a massive increase in cheating at university. I do assume that this is due to better reporting, not necessarily an increase in cheating per se. 
• The court case that was filed by Lm (a VroniPlag Wiki case) against the University of Hanover has finally finished with a judgement that the university was within its rights to rescind the doctorate (in German). Another judgement (in German) in another case of a German university rescinding a doctorate for plagiarism (Aeh) also found the university to be within their rights. One would think that with the dozen or so judgements in favor of the universities, people would think twice about filing suit.
• Retraction Watch published an interview with Ana Marušić about "Corrected and Republished Articles".
• In February 2018, a judge in Croatia sued the national ethics panel after it found him to have plagiarizen in his doctoral thesis from 2013, according to Science.
• The Belgian de Standaard published an article in March 2018 (in Dutch) about the Louven university being forced to retract publications that had seen a bit too much of Photoshop 
• The World Conference on Research Integrity 2019 will be held in Hong Kong.  
• A blog article in French at Rédaction Médicale et Scientifique writes about a couple of French cases of academic misconduct and another article there is about salami slicing.

German plagiarism cases in the news

There were four articles in German news this past week or so about a very diverse collection of plagiarism cases. Here are the links and short summaries in English:

1. The taz published an article by Markus Roth about a biography that Stefan Aust, a well-known German writer, published in 2016, „Hitlers erster Feind. Der Kampf des Konrad Heiden“ (Hitler's first enemy - Konrad Heiden's struggle). Heiden, a writer in exile in France, had published a biography of Hitler in the mid-30s. It seems, however, that Aust liberally used text from Heiden himself, just changing the present tense to the simple past tense or adding an explanation of names that would be clear to someone reading in the 30s but not to present day readers. Some examples are given in the taz article.  Aust himself had apparently recently complained that people were looting Heiden's words, but stated that he was setting a monument to Heiden's works. „Wer erzählt hier eigentlich?“ (who is speaking here) is apparently a question difficult to answer, unless one has read much of Heiden's work, as Roth has done (he is also working on a biography of Heiden).
2. Stern reports on a Facebook posting by German folk music star Stefanie Hertel against hate on the historic occasion of Germany passing legislation permitting homosexual couples to marry. Her fans praised her words, but it turned out they weren't acutally hers, but from a TV game show moderator, Michael Thürnau. „Ich fand seine Worte so toll, dass ich ihm einfach nur recht geben konnte“, she defended herself according to Stern, "I found his words so awesome, that I just had to say that he's right." 
3. The DFG, the German funding organization for research, announced that they were reprimanding a scientist "in writing". A life scientist (no name or research institut mentioned) was found to have had extensive word-for-word copies from other publications without reference in a grant application. The DFG investigated, and the scientist conceded that s/he had copied more for the "state-of-the-art" section.
   Since I don't know what a "reprimand in writing" means, I have written to the DFG to ask for clarification. 
4. In other DFG news, a Leibnitz prize (2.5 million €) was awarded to a researcher after all. Just prior to the award ceremony in March 2017, plagiarism allegations arose. The DFG postponed the award in order to investigate. They are satisfied that there was no plagiarism, and thus have now given out the award. The allegations were not made public.

Update: Marco Finetti, the spokesman for the DFG, clarified for me: A reprimand "in writing" is indeed just a letter written to the scientist. But since it has been decided on by the Hauptausschuss, the main body of the DFG, all the scientists in that board and the representatives of the state governments (who finance the universities in Germany) heard the details of the case and decided on this as the weakest sanction. "It is a big blow to the reputation of a scientist", Finetti claimed.

German Defense Minister to keep doctoral degree

The Medical University in Hanover held a press conference on March 9, 2016 that was broadcast live on German television. They announced that the dissertation submitted in 1990 by the current German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen does indeed contain plagiarism (as documented by VroniPlag Wiki), but that they do not see an intention to deceive and thus they are not rescinding the doctorate. They see most of the plagiarism in the introduction, not in the results portion of the thesis. The president of the university stated that there are "errors, but not academic misconduct." The VroniPlag Wiki documents plagiarism on 27 out of 62 pages (43.5 % of the pages in the thesis affected), not only in the introduction, but also in section 3 (Thematic Background and Pathophysiological Fundamentals) as well as in the discussion.

RP online quotes law professor Gerhard Dannemann, one of the VroniPlag Wiki activists, as stating that this decision is irritating because plagiarism is academic misconduct, as has been decided time and again in the German courts when persons who had their doctorates revoked for plagiarism took their universities to court.

The Berlin daily newspaper Tagespiegel notes the close connections between von der Leyen and the MHH. Her husband is an adjunct professor at the MHH and director of the Hannover Clinical Trial Center GmbH that is affiliated with the medical school. She herself is a founder of the school's alumni association.

Since this case was published, VroniPlag Wiki has documented extensive text overlap in five additional dissertations (Acb, Bca, Lcg, Wfe in medicine, Cak in dentistry) and a habilitation (Mjm) from the MH Hanover. It will be interesting to see how these cases that affect people who are not politicians play out. In particular one would hope that these cases would also be dealt with in a timely manner and the results announced to the academic world.

In my opinion the MH Hanover has chosen what they think is a pragmatic solution. They split an academic publication into two parts, an important and a non-important part. Many biomedical researchers fall into the same trap: If the data is falsified or fabricated, they are quick to find fault, but do not find plagiarism to be a problem. This is, however, in direct contradiction to German court decisions that only see a dissertation as submitted as a whole. There is no "scientific core" that is okay, although the rest is tainted. The NSF in the USA is very clear on this topic:

„(1) fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or other serious deviation from accepted practices in proposing, carrying out, or
(2) Reporting results from activities funded by NSF; or retaliation of any kind against a person who reported or provided information about suspected or alleged misconduct and who has not acted in bad faith.“

This is how I see it: When entire pages are taken word-for-word without appropriate citation (for example the VroniPlag Wiki case Go with more than half of the pages containing plagiarism, among them 11 pages taken from the Wikipedia without reference) and passed off as one's own work, it is plagiarism and thus academic misconduct. It is also plagiarism (and thus academic misconduct) when throughout a text words or ideas are presented as the author's own when they are actually taken from another person. There is not a question of intent to deceive inherent in a definition of plagiarism, that can only have an effect on potential sanctions.

The MH Hanover deliberated and tried to find a way to have it both ways: The thesis contains plagiarism, but it is not serious enough to warrant rescinding a doctorate. I suspect this will provoke much discussion with current and future students who do not understand why they are given a failing grade for much less plagiarism.

An Evening at the Academy

In the spring of 2013, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities set up an interdisciplinary working group called "Zitat und Paraphrase" (Quotation and Paraphrase). There was a good bit of controversy at the time, as the group was set up at about the same time that the then German Minister of Education, Annette Schavan, was dealing with a documentation of plagiarism in her dissertation. She was one in a long line of prominent and non-prominent people who used doctorates that were granted partially on the basis of a published thesis that contained much text parallel with one or more other published works. Many academic managers published long and vituperative attacks against the University of Düsseldorf, who was examining the evidence in order to decide if a sanction was warranted. These managers often wrote without having actually examined the evidence themselves, but they had formed an iron-clad opinion and they were defending it with whatever means available. This working group seemed to be one more attempt to whitewash the problems Schavan was having.

It is now 2016, the University of Düsseldorf has since rescinded the thesis of Ms. Schavan, she lost the court case she filed against the university and is now the German ambassador to the Vatican, and the working group needed to bring their sessions to some sort of close. They had invited many speakers, among them me in 2014 (see my blog report on that session), and have now published a volume "Zitat, Paraphrase, Plagiat: Wissenschaft zwischen guter Praxis und Fehlverhalten" (C. Lahusen & C. Markschies (Ed.), 2015, Campus Verlag) with papers by both members of the working group and external guests.

I was also invited to submit a written version of my talk, but since I was in essence telling them what I published in the Handbook of Academic Integrity, I didn't want to repeat myself in print and didn't want to contribute to a common misconception: I don't think that software can do a good job of identifying plagiarism. It can find some text parallels, if the sources are known. But they fail, often miserably, to identify even some blatant plagiarism. The common misconception is that the work of VroniPlag Wiki or the documentation done on the dissertation of Ms. Schavan is somehow done by software. They most certainly were not! There are many small tools that can be used to uncover plagiarism, but the tools have to be used by someone who understands what they are doing. One can't just put a piece of wood on a workbench filled with chiseling tools and expect an intricate piece of art to result. Without the carpenter, as it were, nothing happens. Learning to find and document plagiarism is not hard, but you have to be willing to actually read a text, not throw it at a piece of software and wait for a meaningless number to result.

Anyway, as a final flourish, there was a panel discussion evening on January 28, 2016 at the Academy. There were around 90 persons in attendance, about evenly split between distinguished older persons (mostly gentlemen) and conservatively dressed younger women. Jürgen Kaube, a journalist with the FAZ, was assigned the task of moderating the evening. The guests were

• Christoph Markschies, vice-president of the Academy and former president of the Humboldt-University in Berlin, Professor of Theology and the speaker of the working group;
• Rainer Maria Kiesow, professor of law at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a member of the working group; and
• Susanne Schüssler, publisher of the Klaus Wagenbach Verlag.

One of the members of the working group summed it up quite nicely at the wine-and-pretzels afterwards: Some gentlemen do love the sound of their own voices, don't they?

Markschies opened the evening with an attempt to wittily skirt any problem zones. He made it clear that he has understood that the plagiarism cases documented are not just dissertations by celebrities and that current technical helpers are no panacea for the plagiarism problem. Of course the working group does not have a definition for correct quotation, that can be found in the Harvard style guide! And academic quality is more than just proper quotation. One does see that we have been lax in instructing about good scientific practice, and the application of sanctions is rather dysfunctional. He wondered aloud whether there should be some institution that focuses on such topics, and then handed the discussion over to the moderator.

Kaube wasted no time in slapping the main topic on the table: Wasn't the working group set up to help Schavan? Markschies beats around the bush, noting that the Academy can decide itself what topics it wishes to consider. It has the power to steep itself in any question it likes. Perhaps, he admits, they could have been a bit more transparent when setting up the group, that's all. Kiesow responds that one doesn't have to be a specialist in a particular field to see that quotation marks are missing. Judges can and do easily spot this. And then he launches into an apparent favorite topic, originality. This topic bubbled up on numerous occasions, although that was not the topic of the evening.

Kaube, apparently realizing that Schüssler had not been able to get a word in edgewise, asks for her opinion. She notes that her publishing house does not choose books to publish based on how nicely footnoted they are, on the contrary: They want something readable, at least for a smallish target group. She begins to speak of a case that her publishing house had to deal with (I reported in August 2014 briefly on the case). Here was a lovely book that was marred by too many too close "paraphrases" from the Wikipedia. Although her lawyers correctly stated that she had nothing to fear (as the copyright is distributed amongst all the shoulders of the people who edited the various articles), she still withdrew the book, as it offended her personal publishing pride. She noted dryly that the book is now published in French, so the closeness of the text to the German Wikipedia is much harder to see.

Kaube returned to the originality topic and asked what the problem is when someone just forgets to use quotation marks? He used a rather silly illustration, asking if Einstein's work was worth less would he have plagiarized a line or two here or there. [Note dww: Einstein has actually also been accused of plagiarism, and the published plagiarism documentations at VroniPlag Wiki are not about a line or two, but more like multiple complete pages taken without reference from, among other sources, the Wikipedia. (For example, Go)]

Kiesow avoided the question, turning instead to the issue of many modern dissertations not being read. Markschies jumped in with a meandering historical exposition that appeared to end with Martin Luther's dissertation being a plagiarism (or did he mean Martin Luther King?). There's a bit of back and forth about the topic of reputation, and then Kaube interrupted again. Has anyone ever quoted Schavan's thesis? He followed the question with a jab at the Medical School of Hanover, asking if they are still investigating plagiarism in the medical thesis of the current Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen. He joked that there are only 38 pages in the thesis. [Note dww: Actually, there are 62 pages and I informed the MHH only in September 2015. The University of Bayreuth did manage to examine and rescind the thesis of then Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in only about a week, but that was under extremely intense pressure and during the semester break. As my colleague Gerhard Dannemann and I have shown in a publication in April 2015, most investigations take quite a long time.]

The discussion again veered off into a quality vs. quantity discussion, including the aspects of different cultures in different fields, different genres, and bibliometrics. Every now and then a comment about "those Internet-platforms" bubbled up, or about how dissertations are evaluated, but Kaube had thrown all pretext of moderating to the wind and was in the thick of the discussion. He did report on one of the non-celebrity cases in Münster: It had to do with ape eyes, and turned out to be a plagiarism of a plagiarism (Gt). I spoke to him afterwards to note that that source, too, was a plagiarism, and that the University of Münster has actually sanctioned the advisor of this plagiarism chain.

Markschies and Kiesow attempted various calculations at how long would be necessary to check all past dissertations or when we can expect to have better technical support. Markschies did make the point that educating people about good academic practice is probably useful.

The audience was now permitted to ask questions, and they focus squarely on questions of plagiarism and paraphrase. Various suggestions are made, and it is noted that it really does not matter who discovers or documents a plagiarism, if it is a plagiarism it must be dealt with. The last contribution from the audience stated that VroniPlag Wiki has investigated the thesis of the current Education Minister Johanna Wanka (to my knowledge, no one has looked that closely at it) and of course could not find plagiarism as it is on mathematics and one cannot plagiarize in mathematics and natural sciences. I spoke to the gentleman afterwards and told him that there are some fine specimens of mathematical, chemical, and engineering dissertations that contain plagiarism that are documented at VroniPlag Wiki.

Distribution of cases documented by VroniPlag Wiki by degree awarded [1]

The smoking gun tends to be when errors are faithfully transcribed, or the attempt to rename or renumber something goes awry.

I had some interesting conversations afterwards, but then hurried home as I was hungry. Neither the pretzels satisfied my hunger, nor the discussions my curiosity as to how much effort was put into this working group with what tangible outcome, other than a book that in essence does not add anything original to the discussion of plagiarism now ongoing since five years in Germany, thanks to Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

Chicklit Shitstorm

There is an interesting plagiarism case currently developing in Germany about plagiarism in the genre of self-publisher romance novels, also known as "ChickLit". A similar plagiarism discussion in the area of ChickLit arose in 2013 around the novels of Martina Gercke (I published commentary on this wild theory of the forgotten "placeholders" in German together with S. Schroder). It seems that the successful German romance and fantasy author Cathey Peel / Katja Piel has admitted to publishing two novels that she plagiarized, although she has now depublished that statement.

The first book, Alles begann mit dir, was published both in Kindle Direct Publishing and as a print-on-demand book just before Christmas). One of the readers noted anonymously on the review page at Amazon that the book sounded a lot like it was published as one of the Denise series of books. The Denise series comprised over 500 romance novels published bi-weekly in magazine format by the German Cora Verlag in the 80s and 90s.

Interestingly, there was nothing more than this vague, unsubstantiated claim that started a landslide. No specific source was given, no example other than to say that some aspects were inserted, such as the use of mobile phones.

Amazingly, Piel quickly removed the book from sale and deleted the page at Amazon. Piel posted an article on her Facebook marketing page (now deleted, but I have a copy) explaining that she had recently found the manuscript and thought she had written it many years ago, but it turns out that it was just an exercise in typing that she did when she got her first computer. She had just typed up a novel, that was all.

Well, the bullshit detectors started pinging—30 years ago people were using WordStar or Word 2.0 (doesn't that bring back painful memories?). And storing things on 5 1/4" floppies. Imagine recopying a typing exercise to all the new editors and formats and storage media! Comments started appearing below the Facebook entry, but most of them were of the "shit-happens-we-still-love-you" variety. It was a hard story to believe, but many fans did.

Some, however, began looking for a source. There are a number of potential novels that could be the basis for the book, but since the novel itself is no longer available, even if one could obtain a copy of the potential source, there is nothing to compare it to. And of course, these "romance novels" are all somehow the same with a girl falling in love, getting into trouble, and then there being a happy end.

Piel also quietly and quickly withdrew a second book, Das Amulett in mir. When fans discovered this and questioned her, she stated that it had not been selling well. Now the swarm began asking harder questions and commenting that copyright infringement is a crime. Some were looking at the rest of her books, speculating about potential sources. Piel deleted the Facebook entry, saying that the insults had gotten out of hand.

A few hours later she admitted in another Facebook posting that she had indeed plagiarized:

She offered to return the money earned to the publisher or the authors or to donate the money.  Now a shitstorm broke loose in earnest. Many authors were downright mad that Piel was bringing discredit down on self-publishers. Many readers felt cheated. A few loving fans tried to stand up for Piel, berating the critics for not having anything better to do with their lives than commenting negatively about the plagiarism. Some were pointing to copyright law and calling for the law to step in, although only the plagiarized author could actually bring suit. Other self-publishing authors were angry that Piel was making a living out of self-publishing, but had now admitted to having plagiarized (at least) two of her books. A few hours (and many comments) later, this posting, too, was deleted.  The self-publisher blogs indie publishing and Self-Publisher-Bibel have now weighed-in on the matter (in German). 

I find it interesting to compare this reaction to the reaction many people have about the work that VroniPlag Wiki does in documenting plagiarism in dissertations. One often hears the "anyone can make a mistake" melody when a documentation is first published, and fingers are pointed at the persons documenting the plagiarism, although the dissertations and the sources are all publicly available works. These "plagiarism hunters" are poking around in people's private lives, putting non-prominent people in the stocks, and should be making better use of their time. Until someone actually reads the documentations, it seems. Although they are publicly available on the web site, I often see that people have never actually studied what is found there, although they have a strong opinion about the case. Having a good look at the documentation makes it clear that this is a serious matter and not just a trifle.

It will be interesting to see if the sources do eventually show up. Although the Denise series is not available at the German National Library or the State Library, there are a number of women selling their collections online. Perhaps it will be possible to determine how extensively Piel's two books did plagiarize previously published material.

[Note: an earlier version of this post has been extensively rewritten] 

Mathiopoulos loses court case about rescinded doctorate

As Spiegel Online reports this afternoon, Margarita Mathiopoulos lost her second case against the University of Bonn in an attempt to regain her revoked doctoral degree. She received the degree in 1986, and soon after the newsweekly Spiegel published an article about plagiarism in the thesis. The university decided in 1991 that there was no proof that this misconduct was deliberate, and did not rescind the thesis. A thorough documentation of the case, including many supporting documents, can be found at the MMDoku Wiki.

In the aftermath of the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal in Germany in 2011, the VroniPlag Wiki academic community had a closer look at the thesis and found much more material that was plagiarized, both in sources that were known in 1991 and in additional sources that were identified. The University of Bonn was informed, and they opened a new investigation that ended with the thesis being revoked in April 2012.

Mathiopoulos, who is currently still an honorary professor at the Universities of Braunschweig and Potsdam, took the University of Bonn to court. In December 2012 the administrative court in Cologne decided that the university acted correctly. That court decided that no appeal was permitted. Mathiopoulos sued first against that, and won the right to an appeal. That appeal was argued today in Münster in the Higher Administrative Court, however, this court also decided that the university was within its rights to rescind the thesis. It did, however, permit an appeal to the Federal Administrative Court, and Mathiopoulos has announced that she will be appealing, according to Spiegel Online. Since to date the German courts have upheld almost all rescinded doctorates (when someone was successful, it was on the basis of procedural problems that can and usually are easily corrected), it will be interesting to see what the Federal Court has to say.

In another case at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster today that involved the University of Bonn, it was found that the university was within its rights to revoke the doctoral degree of the director of a company that was found to bribe professors into helping people obtain doctorates, even though the thesis itself has not been found problematic. This case, too, can be appealed.

VroniPlag Wiki case #152: Another German Politician

On Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015, case #152 on the Vroni Plag Wiki site was posted, a doctorate in medicine from 1990. Normally, journalists yawn if they even hear of something like this, as German medical doctorates are more or less a joke. Even the Wissenschaftsrat tried to explain this in 2004 to the medical schools:

Schon seit langem wird - auch von Medizinern - die medizinische Promotion hinsichtlich akademischer und wissenschaftlicher Wertigkeit stark angezweifelt. Aufgrund der in der Bevölkerung weit verbreiteten Gleichsetzung der Begriffe Arzt und Doktor hat sich eine Art akademisches Gewohnheitsrecht entwickelt, demzufolge die Verleihung des Doktorgrades weitgehend unabhängig von der Qualität der Promotionsleistungen erfolgt. Die berufliche und gesellschaftliche Anerkennung als Arzt ist in Deutschland mit dem Doktortitel verbunden. Daraus erklärt sich auch die im Vergleich zu anderen Fächern hohe Promotionsrate (etwa 80 %). Nicht selten wird der Lerneffekt bei Doktorarbeiten angezweifelt. Insbesondere dienen sie durch ihre schlechte Betreuung häufig nicht der wissenschaftlichen Grundausbildung.¹⁰³ Der wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisgewinn dieser „pro-forma“-Forschung ist daher fragwürdig. 

¹⁰³ Dieter Schmid: Die Doktorarbeit im Visier – Titel zwischen Traum und Trauma, in: Via Medici 4, 2003, S. 16-20.[Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen zu forschungs- und lehrförderlichen Strukturen in der Universitätsmedizin, 2004, S. 75]

(Translation by DWW: The academic and scientific credibility of medical doctorates has been called into question for quite some time, even by medical practitioners themselves. Because the general public widely equates the terms physician and doctor, a sort of academic custom has developed by means of which the the doctoral degree is conferred independent of the quality of the research achievements. The occupational and social appreciation of physicians in Germany is linked to the doctoral degree. This explains the high rate of degrees conferred (80 %) when compared to other fields. It is not seldom that the learning effect of the doctoral theses are doubted.  In particular, because of poor mentoring they often do not even serve to teach scientific basics. The scientific contribution of this "pro-forma" research is thus questionable. )

The medical schools have made the occasional attempt to demonstrate that they are doing something, but by and large it has been business as usual.

VroniPlag Wiki case #152 is, however, a special medical thesis. It was submitted by the current Minister of Defense, Ursula von der Leyen. One of her predecessors in office, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, ended up having to step down four years ago after his doctoral dissertation in law was found to be extensively plagiarized.

The press has thus jumped on the case, and is now remembering the academic grumblings about the low quality of medical doctorates. The bloggers are having a field day (Archivalia I - II, Causa Schavan, Erbloggtes I - II - III, all in German, all long). Even Spiegel has both the plagiarism documentation and a discussion of the quality of medical doctorate quality as the lead article in issue 41/2015^*. The Medical University of Hannover has already announced that they have opened an official investigation into the case.

I was at the 7th Prague Forum of the Council of Europe “Towards a Pan-European Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education” this past week, speaking on plagiarism in medical dissertations in Germany. I added a slide on case #152, as so many people were asking me about it. More on the Prague Forum in a coming post, as they have set up ETINED as a site for helping combat academic corruption.

---

^* although they demonstrate in the article that they don't understand Creative Commons licenses. CC-BY-SA means that you name the source and put the result, if you reuse or modify it, also under such a license. They changed the color of a bar and reformatted it to fit, and then slapped a "Der Spiegel" copyright on the picture.

Where there is smoke, there is fire

The researchers at VroniPlag Wiki have grown tired of documenting plagiarism in medical dissertations, especially as some universities don't see a problem with theses such as ones that have nine pages (out of 61) completely copied from the Wikipedia without reference. They call it a cultural difference, they say that the focus is on the data. I have a different opinion on that. If an author was that careless and naive in one place (and it turned out that over half of the pages in that thesis have text overlap), how can we be sure that the data was carefully measured and recorded?

The most recent VroniPlag Wiki case is another example of "where there is smoke, there is fire," showing that just finding one instance of extensive plagiarism may indicate that there is more.

The LMU Munich has an open access thesis repository, so some German-language theses in different fields from that repository were compared with the German-language Wikipedia. The thesis at the top of the list was interesting, as it had a long sequence of characters identical to just one article in the Wikipedia, although it was not a large percent of the entire thesis. Googling phrases from the thesis quickly turned up many more sources (currently 24, three of them other Wikipedia pages) for text that was often used entirely verbatim and without reference. The documentation was published last week on VroniPlag Wiki and the university informed. 

Dissertation #151 (Xg) was submitted to the Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogy at the LMU Munich in 2009 and is about the intercultural understanding of art. If you look closely at the bar code generated from the manual documentation you can see three large patches of bright red that indicate that more than 75% of the page has been taken from a source without proper attribution.

The Xg Barcode (Report in German)

1. The first largish red band, pages 64–71, was taken verbatim from the German-language Wikipedia article on art.
2. The next large red band, pages 75–93, was taken verbatim from a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 2006 about a Chinese painter.
3. The largest rest band, pages 113–157, was taken from a Diplom-Thesis (approx. a Master's thesis) that was submitted in 1999 to the University of Tübingen and published in 2004 on a pedagogical concept for intercultural education using art. 

VroniPlag Wiki has documented many such doctorates in the past, so this alone would hardly be newsworthy, were it not for a strange paragraph in the Promotionsordnung, the rules governing doctorates at this faculty at the LMU Munich, that have been in place since 2005:

§ 16 (Nichtvollzug der Promotion und Entzug des Doktorgrades)
"(1) Hat der Kandidat bei einer Promotionsleistung getäuscht und wird dies erst nach Erteilung des Bescheids gemäß § 12 Abs. 3 bekannt, so kann nachträglich die Doktorprüfung für nicht bestanden erklärt werden.
[...]
(3) [...] Eine Entscheidung nach Abs. 1 und 2 ist nur innerhalb einer Frist von fünf Jahren nach Erteilung des Bescheids gemäß § 12 Abs. 3 möglich." 

Translation: A doctorate can only be rescinded within five years of it being awarded.

That means that the LMU Munich has a statute of limitations on one type of academic misconduct. If it turns out that someone cheated, but it's been more than 5 years, they get lucky. They can keep their doctorate.

Xg's doctorate was awarded 6 years ago, so she can breathe easy. Of course, she might still be open to civil suits brought by the authors from which she copied on the basis of copyright law.

A law professor at the LMU Munich, Volker Rieble, published a treatise in German last year about acquiring a doctorate by sitting tight (Plagiatverjährung. Zur Ersitzung des Doktorgrades). He asks what is more important: Peace and quiet on the dissertation front with less time-consuming investigations of previously examined work, or the defense of academic standards? He pleads for the latter. The blog Erbloggtes had a long discussion about Rieble's article at the time, otherwise there has not (yet) been much reaction to his article. Things move slowly at German universities. But I think that it is time for some serious action about plagiarism at all levels: students, graduate students, researchers. Defining it away will not make it go away.

Court decisions rolling in

There are quite a number of court decisions being handed down recently in Germany on academic misconduct cases. I have three new addition to my list today:

1. The Bundesverwaltungsgericht, the Federal Administrative Court in Germany handed down an important decision in connection with the plagiarism case of former defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. The German parliamentary academic service had written documents for him that turned up in his dissertation, verbatim. A journalist filed a freedom of information order to obtain the documents, but the Bundestag refused. Of course, a copy of the documents had already turned up in a brown paper envelope addressed to one of the GuttenPlag Wiki researchers, bearing no return address, and they were already documented. But it was impossible to verify if the documents were correct. The journalist wanted to see if the copies were, indeed true. He worked his way through the lower courts, who rejected his suit to see the documents. Today the federal court ruled that any document prepared by the academic service is obtainable by FOI request. Within hours the first FOI application for a list of all such documents was filed. The newspaper that filed suit, Die Welt, reports on its success.
2. The Leipziger Volkszeitung reports that VroniPlag Wiki case #8 Sh (documented in 2011) has now been decided by the court (VG Halle) in favor of the University of Halle-Wittenberg, who rescinded the thesis in April 2012. The court held with the university, which stated that the "technical deficiencies" (handwerkliche Mängel) were so numerous that they became the methodology and thus intent to deceive.
3. A colleague dug out a decision by the VG Würzburg from 25 March 2015 (AZ: W 2 K 14.228) about a doctorate in dental medicine that was awarded at the University of Würzburg in 2001 in the area of the history of medicine. In 2011 an anonymous letter informed the university that this dissertation was a plagiarism of a dissertation submitted in 1999, and that that one had been written by the doctoral adviser himself, as had many others. The university rescinded the doctorate in 2012. The dentist sued the university on numerous grounds, such as the statute of limitations having run out and all sorts of detailed university administrative details not having been attended to properly. The court ruled that the plagiarism was enough for proving intent to deceive, and also listing 199 sources in her literature list where she only quoted 67 served only to inflate the appearance of scholarship and was also to be considered intent to deceive. The text of the decision is not publicly available but can be found using the case number in legal databases.

So as in the plagiarism case against Schavan, the courts appear to be doing a great job of upholding good scientific practice. They stand by the decisions of the university, no matter what the paladins spout in the media.

Dr. Hoss Cartwright

Yes, indeed. The older, or shall I say, more experienced of my readers will fondly remember Hoss Cartwright, of Bonanza fame. A German blogger, Fefe, pointed me in the direction of an article in the Laborjournal blog from March 2015 that I completely missed.

Burkhard Morgenstern is a professor for Bioinformatics in Göttingen, Germany. He apparently got fed up with all the spam solicitations for articles for the many junk journals, that he decided to get back at them. He spammed 20-30 journals (some even in open CC) with a short letter from Dr. Hoss Cartwright, requesting to join the editorial board of "your exciting journal".

Request to join editorial board

About a week later Hoss was welcomed to the board, with apologies for the late response:

Happy to have you

They even put his CV on the page, apparently without reading it. Morgenstern documented it with a screenshot. The CV has since been removed from the page, although the Internet Archive still has a link to a snapshot of the listing with Hoss on the board.

Best CV I've seen in a long time

I contacted Prof. Morgenstern and he noted that he had done a similar thing some years back with another OMICS journal. At that time he managed to get the fictional "Peter Uhnemann", a fake person invented by the German satirical magazine Titanic, on board the journal "Molecular Biology."  Jonathan Eisen's blog The Tree of Life gives details of this scam of the spammers.

If these journals are so careless in putting together their editorial boards, one wonders about the quality of the peer review done for the journals. OMICS had a bit of a spat with the National Institute of Health (lawyer's letter can be read here)  and is now forbidden from suggesting that they are listed on PubMed Central or on PubMed. OMICS appears, however,  to be purchasing journals that are still listed on the databases, according to ScholarlyOA, in order to get around this.

Another attempt to get listed on PubMed Central appears to be to have the authors submit an "author manuscript" to PMC, as NIH-funded researchers are now required to do. When their paper is published, then a link to the OMICS journal article is added. The journal article now also includes a link back to PubMed. Here is one of many examples: Author manuscript at PubMed Central, put in PMC on 2015-02-23 and then received by OMICS two days later and published 2015-03-21.    

Perhaps it is time to teach people that PubMed is an index and not a mark of quality. One must still read and evaluate the papers.

Update:  Dr. Hoss has now been accepted for the editorial board of Pak Publishing Group's "International Journal of Veterinary Sciences Research":

Dr. Hoss accepted as editor for another journal

The end of a long plagiarism case

One of the first cases that was documented by the German plagiarism documentation community VroniPlag Wiki in 2011 was the doctorate of a German politician, Jürgen Goldschmidt, the mayor of a town in the Lausitz. In addition to extensive amounts of text overlap, there was a quite strange use of primary sources used in the thesis (documented in German under Befunde). Some examples:

• "Tagesschau vom 02.12.2004" (p. 42)
• "Super Illu 17/2005" (p. 45)
• "WDR vom 24.03.2007" (p. 51)
• "Pressemitteilung der Bundesregierung, 2008" (p. 67)
• "Studie im Auftrag des vdw Niedersachsen/Bremen 2002" (p. 71)

Tagesschau is the nightly news, the Super Illu is a tabloid magazine, not generally an academic source for population data. Interestingly, the tabloid itself gives their source for the data: the national statistics board, Statistisches Bundesamt.

CC-BY-SA VroniPlag Wiki

In January 2013, the TU announced that they were not retracting the doctorate, but requesting that Goldschmidt submit a new, properly referenced version of the thesis. This was rather odd, as authors who reuse texts of others, including the Wikipedia, without referencing them can generally not be assumed to have kept track of which texts they took from where. Goldschmidt was given six months to submit an updated version of the thesis. In August 2013 the press secretary assured me that the new version was submitted and was being examined. During 2014 I bugged the TU a few times, asking if they were making any progress and offering assistance, as VroniPlag Wiki had additional material that was not yet documented. They declined, but were working on it.

The press secretary of the TU Berlin put out a press announcement today:

Jürgen Goldschmidt hatte an der Fakultät VI Planen Bauen Umwelt der TU Berlin die Dissertation „Management des Stadtumbaus unter Berücksichtigung der städtebaulichen Rahmenbedingungen“ im Dezember 2009 verteidigt. Im April 2010 bekam er die Urkunde überreicht, mit der der akademische Grad „Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften“ verliehen wird. Im Sommer 2011 wurden Plagiatsvorwürfe öffentlich.
Daraufhin gab es ein Verwaltungsverfahren zur Prüfung der Vorwürfe. Herr Goldschmidt erfüllte die von der Universität erteilte Auflage nicht, sodass in Konsequenz ihm der Doktortitel entzogen worden wäre.
Am 7. Mai 2015 hat Jürgen Goldschmidt seinen Doktorgrad inklusive seiner Urkunde an die TU Berlin zurückgegeben.

[Jürgen Goldschmidt defended the dissertation "..." to Faculty VI Planning Construction Environment of the TU Berlin in November 2009. He was given the certificate in April of 2010 that gave him the degree of "Doctor of Engineering". In the summer of 2011 accusations of plagiarism were made public.
As a result of this, an administrative process was initiated to examine the accusations. Mr. Goldschmidt did not fulfill the conditions that were imposed by the university, thus the doctoral degree would have been rescinded. On May 7, 2015 Jürgen Goldschmidt returned his degree and the certificate to the TU Berlin. -- translation dww]

This is a new method of resolving a case of plagiarism: faced with extensive evidence that would lead to the degree being rescinded, the person in question returns the degree. It is perhaps legally questionable if a degree that is conferred by a faculty can be returned by the conferee. But that is perhaps moot, as the university has now brought a case to a close that has been open for over 3 1/2 years.

Additionally, it was discovered that the second case that was reported to the TU Berlin, Aos, has been similarly resolved as of April 2015.