Cleaning up my browser tabs

The second Corona semester has now come to an end and I seem to have about 200 tabs open in various browsers. Some of the tabs concern interesting plagiarism and academic integrity questions, so here's just a brief list:

• The Minister for Education and Science in the Ukraine was being investigated for plagiarism (German) in his doctoral disseration as of July 2020. He is apparently also the rector of the university of technology in Tschernihi.
• The HEADT Centre at Humboldt University, Berlin has a series of recorded seminars on plagiarism, image manipulation, authorship, and content ownership, sponsored by Elsevier. 
• An arXiv preprint "Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Libraries" of a conference presentation at the Intelligent Computer Mathematics - 12th International Conference, CICM 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, July 8-12, 2019
• Michael V. Dougherty published a book in 2020 on "Disguised Academic Plagiarism - A Typology and Case Studies for Researcher and Editors". (Conflict of interest: I reviewed this book for Springer)
• There was quite a spat over the diploma thesis and dissertation of an Austrian minister who stepped down over the incident. This led to many publications around the topic, for example one about degree mills at Der Standard (in German).
• Simone Belli (Spain), Cristian López Raventós (Mexico), and Teresa Guarda (Ecuador) published a paper "Plagiarism Detection in the Classroom: Honesty and Trust Through the Urkund and Turnitin Software" in the Proceedings of ICITS 2020. Of course, I find it very problematic to be using the numbers returned by Turnitin and Urkund as the basis of judging anything. The numbers are meaningless and do NOT give a percentage of plagiarism but an indication of text similarity. They are NOT the same thing. They write: "Thanks to these programs, teachers have a powerful tool to assess the level of honesty of students. [...] Thanks to this tool, the teacher can easily justify a bad grade that shows the percentage of plagiarism in the work presented by the student. At the same time, it saves time spent reviewing a text that is not evaluable due to its illegitimate origin." This is wrong on so many levels, I will be talking about this on March 24, 2020, at the conference sponsered by the Office of Research Integrity.
  
• My university, HTW Berlin, now has ethical guidelines for research! (in German)
• A court in Berlin has decided that a Berlin university was correct in exmatriculating a student for plagiarism. Berlin universities have a policy of "two strikes and you are out", if a student is found plagiarizing twice, they are exmatriculated. In this case, the student was found to be plagiarizing once in his Bachelor's program and once in his Master's program. He felt that he should be "allowed" on plagiarism in each program, the university insisted that the programs are consecutive, and thus he is out. Need I mention that the student was studying .... ethics and philosophy?
  

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.

Diverse links

Here are some links that need documenting:

• Journal Accepts Paper Reading “Get Me Off Your F[...] Mailing List”
  Not only was the paper plagiarized and still had the names of the original authors, it should have been abundantly clear that this was not an academic paper worthy of publication. That did not stop the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (already listed on Jeffrey Beale's list of predatory publishers) from accepting this paper found "excellent" by the peer reviewers that was to be published soon after receipt of the handling fee of $ 150...
• Spears: How my fake science paper earned me a shot at an editor's job
  Same song, second verse. Who cares who you are or if you are a plagiarist, just send the review as soon as possible, okay? And would you like to be an editor?
• A case of plagiarism by a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, Iran is widely discussed.  
• In Spain, a politician was found to have plagiarized in his dissertation ( [Levante EMV 1 - 2 ] - [Valencia Plaza])  as well as a professor [abc.es].
• A high-ranking Swiss public official in the Bundesamt für Kultur, now retired, pretended to have a doctorate for over 30 years. The Tagesanzeiger wonders if, since he was the person deciding which institutions would get money, no one cared.
• Back in October there was a bit of kerfluffle at the LMU in Munich, Germany, about an applicant for a professorship said to have plagiarized his application lecture. 
• Retraction Watch found this gem of a journal: "Article which was reviewed & approved by EB member with lowest plagiarism will only be allow to published." Seems rather similar to a Springer journal recently encountered: "The Protein Journal will reject without consideration any submission that has a similarity score of 45% or more."
• And finally, another highlight from Retraction Watch about a professor plagiarizing from his grad students in Canada. The professor defends his actions by publicly insulting the grad student.

There will be more, I'm afraid, to come. 

Spain: Prizes for Plagiarists

We'll start 2014 off with an old case from Spain that bubbled up recently.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article by Thomas Urban on 26 August 2013 entitled Wissenschaft in Spanien: Abschreiben mit Auszeichnung about some curious cases of plagiarism in Spain.

Alejandro Blanco, former judoko and currently president of the Spanish Olympic committee and head of the bid to bring the Olympic games 2020 to Spain, submitted a doctoral dissertation on the sociological and athletic aspects of the Spanish Olympic team 2008 to the University of Vigo. Unfortunately, it was soon found that a thesis on the same subject had been submitted to the same professor a few years earlier, and there was a lot of text in common. Surprisingly, this professor had just received a position at the Olympic Academy of Spain. Since the degree had not yet been granted, the thesis was declared to be just a "scientific study" and quickly buried. (Reports in Spanish: el Diario - Faro de Vigo)

According to Süddeutsche,  this was not the first brush with plagiarism in Vigo. Three years earlier the former dean and professor for physical chemistry, Juan Carlos Mejuto, was found to have plagiarized Chinese experts in two articles he wrote together with five other authors for the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data. Mejuto's excuse was that since his English was so bad, he was using the Chinese paper as a "language pattern" and by mistake sent in the version with the copied portions. The Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data was not amused, plagiarism is taken very seriously in the United States. The paper was withdrawn in 2011 on grounds of "duplicate publication" and the authors banned from publishing for two years. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on the retraction on 20 June 2011 in an article entitled Plagiatoren in Spanien: War die Guttenberg-Affäre denn zu gar nichts gut?

Two of the co-authors were subsequently awarded prizes for their work on the same topic, one was even awarded a research scholarship for any foreign university they desired. Süddeutsche notes that this happened at the same time that university teachers were being laid off right and left in order to save money. Mejuto was allowed to continue to lead a doctoral research group and was also awarded a government prize from an old friend who was now minister. The rector of the university, according to Süddeutsche, supported the plagiarists, although he now has a bit of a problem himself involving money laundering to the tune of 1,6 million euros.

The next case was a group of business researchers writing about agriculture in the Rio Miño area. They made a mistake while copying entire passages from study about the Ebro area, and also copied some passages about the geography of the Ebro that did not really fit. No matter, they were awarded a prize of 42,722 euros from an EU fund for their "research".

Süddeutsche lists other cases of cronyism and corruption at Vigo and other schools. The problem, the author states, seems to lie in the incestuous nature of Spanish academics. With little money to travel and work with their colleagues outside of Spain, there are no outside influences, and most of the jobs and prized appear to be awarded to good friends.

Update 2014-11-10: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had a very long article in June 2013 by Paul Ingendaay on some of these cases and more: Korruption in Vigo: Die Willkür der Kaziken.





 

Nobel Laureate accused of plagiarism

The Märkische Oder Zeitung (among others, it is a dpa story) reports that the Spanish Nobel Laureate for Literature Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002) has been accused of plagiarism.

A judge in Barcelona has determined that there is enough evidence that the novel "La cruz de San Andrés" (The San Andrés Cross) for which he was awarded the Spanish literary prize "Planeta" in 1994, is similar to a novel by the relatively unknown author Maria del Carmen Formoso. The newspaper "El País" reports on April 21 that the judge's decision is based on an expertise prepared by a scholar of literature.

The court case is being brought against the publishing house Planeta, since Cela died in 2002. Formoso hat submitted her work to the prize committee two months in advance of Cela's submission. Formoso accused the publisher of giving her novel to Cela so that he could use it as a basis for his own work.

Formoso has been fighting for 10 years to get legal recognition of her case. She has twice lost cases in lower courts, but in 2006 the spanish constitutional court ordered a new trial. The court in Barcelona was requested to decide whether sufficient evidence is given to re-open the trial, which they now have done.