WCRI 2019 - Day 1a

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

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It was the first full day of the WCRI conference 2019, and oh my, it was full!

It was pouring rain this morning, so I was glad I had the umbrella from the conference swag and my light poncho. I tried the shortcut someone told me about - just walk through the HKU subway station and take all the elevators and escalators. It worked! So now it's a nice walk up to the university.

Charlie Day (CEO, Office of Innovation and Science, Australia) opened the day with a talk on "Research, risk and trust: translating ideas for impact". The talk was dedicated to Paul Taylor, who worked with the thesis that good management of research integrity is an enabler of technological progress and not a blocker. 

He sketched the typical challenges that occur when translating research into economic success and noted that the most innovative people tend to be the ones who are the most difficult to work with. His suggested responses include

• Having policies and processes for research and translation, that create trust
• Researcher education – access to training osvital
• Encouraging researcher mobility
  
  

Maura Hiney (Head of Post-Award and Evaluation at the Health Research Board, Ireland) spoke in an extremely fast manner about "Integrity challenges in evaluating the path to impact". She insisted that we need to move from what we currently measure as research success to somehow measuring how we are bringing better services to the citizenry, improved health and well-being, better GNP returns, more or smarter jobs, safer environment, better quality of life, food security, etc. 

She listed a number of plans and documents that would be useful and discussed some DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) principles.

I found it interesting that she was encouraging citizen science, enabling people from all walks of life to participate in the scientific review process. In Ireland they have trained 150 randomly selected public reviewers to evaluate research.  

Tracey Bretag managed to get a photo of her comparison of Research Integrity vs. Resposible Research and innovation:

https://www.coalition-s.org/

Maura noted that we can't talk about translation of research into products without discussing Open Science. As part of the controversial Plan S, she noted that in Ireland all publications resulting from public funding must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms; Only OA publications will be considered in applications for funding; and there exists a cap on the cost of OA publications (APCs). A bit of discussion ensued about Plan S :)

A reference was made to the Open Science Partnership Toolkit, I found it here: https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/3-1442/v1

 

Maria Leptin (EMBO director, Genetics professor at University of Cologne, Germany) then spoke on "What innovation can tell us about responsible conduct of researchers." She quoted Nobel prize winner Andre Geim: "It is better to be wrong that to be boring" and noted that many of his experiments were not exactly ethical (see a description of how one of the experiments came to be).

She feels that the speed of discovery would increase if experimental failures were publishable.

In speaking with young researchers at EMBO she has found these major contributing factors to the discoveries theymade:

• Stable, longer term (5 years +) funding, flexibility
• Ability to make ad hoc decisions and the freedom to follow new ideas
• Intellectual environment with critical and stimulating colleagues, good scientific culture,
• high-level core facilities as infrastructure.

Sounds good!

After coffee I attended the Plagiarism session, as I was speaking there myself.

Nannan Yi (University of Leuven, Southeast University, China)

spoke about "Perceptions of plagiarism by biomedical researchers: an online survey in Europe and China" She conducted a survey by email and had over 1000 responses from Europe and China. A comparison of the answers showed quite a difference in perception in some instances, for example more Europeans reported being unsure if they were plagiarizing than Chinese researchers. More Chinese than Europeans had a perception of ghostwriting as plagiarism. 

Lisa Winstanley (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) looked at extending the traditional definition of plagiarism to include images and art. The problem is that in art there are techniques that might be considered copying: Pastiche, homage, parody. But if they are done on purpose, then it is not academic misconduct. Thus, she insists that students submit a reflection on how they came about to create their artwork that can include statement such as "I decided to create a parody of ....". 

There is not much research on visual plagiarism. Due to the ambiguous boundaries and inadequate adressing in policy documents they do not sufficiently address visual arts educational needs.

She listed some tools useful in finding image sources:

TinEye, iTrace, Google reverse image search, and the Blob filter and showed examples of the various grey areas. I was surprised to learn that in marketing companies will brazenly copy the ad of a competitor, but hiring their own actors and making their own pictures. There were some plagiarism pictures on boredpanda that I picked out from her slides.

She also noted that there is a site, Steal like an Artist, that very nicely explains what is permissable and what is not. 

We had a good discussion on the difference between copyright and plagiarism, a lawyer in the audience noted that he would always go with copyright, as he will probably have more luck with that in court. 

Jerry Hoffman (Southern Institute of Technology, Invercargill, New Zealand) spoke on

"Managing plagiarism and academic fraud in higher degree programmes"

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (2017) noted that tertiary eucation providers need to have good processes in place to ensure that cheating is detected and will not allow students to pass assessments where they have not met the required standard.

His university has started to offer a two-hour referencing workshop and dissertation workshops where issues of plagiarism and academic fraud are discussed in detail.

The topic is also Addressed in all taught classes to varying degrees, and supervisors discuss plagiarism issues with student. They use Safe-Assign to test for plagiarism, but that usually only finds copies from previous student work, not necessarily things copied from the internet. But using Google can be useful here.

An oral defence is held when there is some suspicion of plgiarism. If serious plagiarism or academic fraud is detected, the result will usually be a failing grade. 

Then I spoke on "A breakdown in communication: journal reactions to information about plagiarism and duplicate publications"

https://twitter.com/Aishoola/status/1135402239562960896

The room was full (maybe 60 people) and we had a very good discussion session.

I got some lunch and tried to visit the poster session but the room was sooooo cramped and there were so many people that I pretty much just managed to visit 3 posters. One I had already photographed yesterday:

This poster from Indonesia was printed with batik on cloth dyed red. The text was put on with wax before the dying! Unfortunately, there had to be a correction, so it is printed on photo paper and stuck on with velcro :)

Matt Hodgkinson had a very nice poster discussing his frustrations as a research integrity person at Hindawi getting universities or national integrity bodies to answer his emails. I sympathize! I can't get Blogger to upload the picture tonight, his tweet links to a picture [that will only show up if I download it and then upload to Google]:

The third poster was about the Contributor Roles Taxonomy CRediT. It's a brilliant idea, but there was no way to get a picture without poking my elbow into someone's eye.

That's just half of Monday, I'm exhausted and heading to bed. More tomorrow!

Update to include another image.

Random Mathematics Paper Accepted by Junk Journal

First there was SciGen for generating gobbledygook papers that sounded like computer science. Now there is Mathgen, a service for producing LaTeX-formatted papers on mathematics that are complete nonsense.

The blog That's Mathematics written by Nate Eldredge reports that one such paper has been accepted by the "journal" Advances in Pure Mathematics, published as Open Access along with over 200 others in a wide range of fields by SCIRP. At least someone tried to read the manuscript – there are a few editor's notes, requesting, for example, a proof of one of the more ludicrous theorems. But after the author wrote back the paper was accepted, contingent of 500 € being deposited in the bank account of the journal.

These junk journals are giving Open Access a bad name. They spam our inboxes with invitations to submit articles on an extremely wide range of topics. They offer, for a price, an international publication with an ISBN or ISSN, just the thing for administrative bean-counters who define quality as being the quantity of publications There does not appear to be an easy way to stop them.

If you read German, there is an article worth reading in the Zeit Online collecting many of the cases that have been discussed here and elsewhere, as well as some wonderful new ones such as Mathgen. Eldredge has also published a randomly generated book, Galois Knot Theory.

Peer Review, Impact Factors, and the Decline of Science

[I've had interesting tabs open for weeks waiting for time to report on them. Sorry for the delay. -dww]

The Economist reported on October 19, 2013 (pp. 21-24) that there is "Trouble at the lab". Indeed. And trouble has been brewing for quite some time without a single identifiable culprit or an easy way to solve the problem. This problem is concerned with predatory publishing, irreproducibility of scientific results, and the use of quantitative data as an attempt to judge quality.

University administrations, search and tenure committees, governments, funding associations, and other bodies need some way of judging people they don't know in order to decide whether to offer them jobs or promotions or funding. This has often boiled down to counting the number of publications, or the impact factors of the journals in which their articles are published. Coupled with the crisis in publishing, with the subscription price of subscription journals exploding, an unhealthy mix is brewing.

Predatory publishers promise quick publication in good-sounding "international" journals, using the Open Access "golden road" to extract fees from authors. They promise peer review, but if at all they only seem to look at the formatting. Established publishers trying to keep up their profits have incorporated more and more journals into their portfolios without keeping a watchful eye on quality control.

Enter John Bohannon. In October 2013 Bohannon published an article in Science, Who's Afraid of Peer Review? He details a sting operation that he conducted between January and August 2013, submitting 304 papers with extremely obvious deficiencies to journals that he chose both from Lund University's "Directory of Open Access Journals" as well as from Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers.

Bohannon has put his data online, showing that 82% of the journals chosen from Beale's list accepted the fabricated paper, as well as 45% of the journals on the DOAJ list. Predictably, DOAJ is not amused and accusing Bohannon of, among other things, racism because he chose African-sounding names for the authors (1 - 2).

In August 2013, Nature journalist Richard van Noorden detailed a scheme by publishers called "citation stacking" in which a group of publishers collude to quote extensively from each other's journals in order to avoid being sanctioned for coercive citation. This activity was described in Science in 2012 by Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong as a process by which authors are instructed to quote from a publisher's own journals in order to increase the so-called impact factor. van Noorden's article focused on a group of Brazilian journals, so he, too, was accused of racism. This is unfortunate, as it detracts from a very serious problem.

We find ourselves today in a rapidly expanding world with scientific research being conducted in many different places and much money being invested in producing results. People need publications, and have little time for doing peer review, a job that is generally not paid for and performed as a service to the community. Universities in countries without a tradition of rigorous scientific practice have researchers who need publications, and there are people out to make money any way they can. Researchers competing for scarce jobs in countries that are trying to spend less on science and education than they have in the past are also sometimes tempted to follow the path of less resistance and publish with such journals. And some are not aware that they have just selected a publication that sounds like one that is well respected, as Beall has noted.

I don't have a solution to offer, other than boycotting the use of quantitative data about publications and getting people to be aware of the scams going on. We need to get serious about peer review, embracing such concepts as open access pre- and post-publication peer review in order to get more rigor into the publication process. I realize that people have been complaining about the decline of science since at least Charles Babbage (Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, And on Some of Its Causes, 1830). But we are in grave danger of letting bad science get the upper hand.

And what happens to those who try and point out some of the dicier parts of science? Nature just published another article by van Noorden, together with Ed Yong and Heidi Ledford, Research ethics:  3 ways to blow the whistle.

Update 2013-12-01: fixed a typo

Open Discourse

Andrew I Dayton notes in Retrovirology 2006, 3:55 doi:10.1186/1742-4690-3-55 that online journal clubs are springing up for debating papers before they are published (hopefully in an Open Access journal). He discusses JournalReview.org, which is primarily concerned with medical fields, as well as a few others. I do think that this is the way science must go!

Articles withdrawn from Open Access Database

I just ran across an article from 2007 about arXiv.org, one of the many Open Access databases, that withdrew 65 papers on General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology by 14 Turkish authors on the basis of the papers containing plagiarized material. One of the authors, a grad student at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, was listed on 40 (!) of the papers.

The papers in question are replaced with a reference that they are plagiarized and the true sources are given. This is extremely important - don't just remove without a trace, but leave a note both of who the plagiarist was and the true source, in case any of the plagiarized versions are referenced elsewhere.

This is one of the advantages of online Open Access - in a printed journal, the retraction appears sometime later. Online, the reference itself can be replaced with the retraction notice, giving credit to the original authors.