Just a notice

An interesting kind of retraction was recently brought to my attention. It seems that a professor of law had published an article in the bi-weekly Juristenzeitung on, of all things, copyright and academia. As the Passauer Neue Presse reports and the Legal Tribune online comments, this article about Open Access reproduced some passages from another legal scholar without attribution, and the university is investigating.

Sharp eyes found an intriguing entry on page 936 of the current issue of Juristenzeitung: For only $ 33 plus tax (unless your institution subscribes) you can download a copy of this short notice (translation mine, names left out to keep me from being sued):

Notice about the article "'Ein Knauf als Tür' ...." by U..... M.....:

This contribution contains verbatim material on pages 222-225 of the main text as well as in the footnotes on pages 223, 224, 226, 227, 231, and 232 that was taken from the article by A.... P. .... I regret deeply, that this presumption of copyright happened and accept the full responsibility for it. I would like make a formal apology to A... P...

U..... M......

(Editor's note: We were informed of the problem by the author and wish to join in the apology. The electronic version of the article is no longer online.)

Hmm, this is a de-publication at the publisher's site instead of publishing a retraction notice. The online table of contents jumps from page 221 to page 232, the article has vanished. Of course, the abstract is still on the Juris database and at Researchgate and probably a number of other places. Do lawyers not understand that an article, once published, is now publicly available, and thus should not just disappear, but a notice of what happened put in its place? It could even have been quoted, and of course still may be, as it is in the print issues.

Isn't there something also missing in the "notice"? An apology to the readers? Because they, much more so than the original writer of the text, are the ones who were misled. A documentation and discussion of the extent of the "verbatim material" can be found in the depths of the Internet.

Plagiarism problems in new Iranian president's dissertation?

Foreign Policy reports that Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani completed his doctoral work at the Scottish Glasgow Caledonian University in 1999. A Farsi-language web site has published (apparently, I don't read Farsi, but there are text passages compared in English on the site) a documentation of similarities between his abstract and other books. Since doctoral theses are not published in the UK, the thesis is not available for general reading.

An update notes that:

Glasgow Caledonian University Director of Communications Charles McGehee writes, "Our University library has just confirmed that  Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence is referenced in the main body of the Dr Rouhani's thesis and in the bibliography."
He also notes, "we have formally requested permission from the author to digitise the thesis and submit it to the British Library so that it may be accessible to the wider public."

The article in Foreign Policy details other problems with the academic biography of Rowhani.

Perhaps the EU should consider insisting on all dissertations being published digitally?

Austrian Plagiarism

The University of Innsbruck has been in the news recently in Germany at least because of two cases of plagiarism in law doctorates.

The first is the news that Dominic Stoiber, the son of Bavarian politician Edmund Stoiber and sister of Veronica S. (the "Vroni" of VroniPlag Wiki) is allowed to keep his doctorate. Reports are available in German from Spiegel Online, Abendzeitung München, Münchener Merkur (no link, as they support the LSR).

He submitted a thesis in 2010 called "Die Föderalismusreform I der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Beschreibung und Bewertung der Reform und eine Analyse der Bewährung in der Praxis anhand des Nichtraucherschutzes" to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, about some political work his father did.

Spiegel Online quotes the university senate chair Ivo Hajnal as stating that the proceedings focused on the term Wesentlichkeit (fundamentality). According to the Austrian rules the university examiners can only assume that fraudulent merits have been obtained when

 "[..] in Täuschungsabsicht wesentliche Teile der Arbeit ohne entsprechende Hinweise abgeschrieben worden sind. Besagte Wesentlichkeit ist dann anzunehmen, wenn bei objektiver Betrachtung der Verfasser der Arbeit davon ausgehen musste, dass bei entsprechenden Quellenhinweisen die Arbeit nicht positiv oder zumindest weniger günstig beurteilt worden wäre, entsprechende Quellenhinweise also zu einem ungünstigeren Ergebnis (sprich: einer schlechteren Note) geführt hätten". [... with the intent to defraud fundamental parts of the thesis were copied without the necessary references. This fundamentality is given when the author of the thesis can assume that haven given correct references, under an objective examination the thesis would have been graded failed or given a worse grade. This means that if the references would have been given, a worse grade would have been assigned. -- dww]

That means that he would only have been considered a fraud if he would have received a worse grade by giving proper references. And since he would have received the same grade (!) even if the references would have been given, this is not fraud.

The Abendzeitung München reports that an Austrian newspaper, Tiroler Tageszeitung,  asked the Austrian plagiarism expert Stefan Weber to investigate the 287 page thesis. He documented a number of minor transgressions and a copy of a term paper written by a student in the third semester 15 years previously. The university then began investigations, according to § 89 UnivG.

The university has announced that Stoiber will be keeping his degree and for reasons of privacy and secrecy will not elaborate on their reasoning.

The second case is VroniPlag Wiki case #42. This law thesis was being prepared at the HU Berlin, when the doctoral advisor refused to continue mentoring the student. The thesis was a plagiarism of an old textbook. According to the advisor, when the student requested to just be given a lesser (but passing) grade, the advisor threw him out. One year later he submitted a thesis on the same subject to the University of Innsbruck, where it was accepted.

The University of Innsbruck was informed of the plagiarism when the case was publicly named - as well as the university of applied sciences at which the author currently is teaching. They at first did not even acknowledge that they had been informed, it took a number of increasingly intensive letters to get them to assent to opening an investigation.

A journalist for Zeit Online just tried to contact both the universities in question. Innsbruck pretty much told him that they had no intention of telling anyone what the results of the investigation is. The Heilbronn college stated that they are waiting on the decision from Innsbruck before doing anything, although their own ethics policy would permit them to start an own investigation. Seeing as how the documentation is public - and with 68 % of the pages tainted, extensive - it is not clear why they are not taking action. Since Innsbruck seems to be playing secrecy games and it is not clear that they will be informed as to how the case turns out, this is rather a modern-day version of Waiting for Godot.

I find it troubling that questions of academic integrity are not openly discussed, but only decided behind closed doors. Reading the comments section on these articles is even more shocking. A student from Heilbronn writes in the comments section that she does not understand why

"[... ] diese völlig belanglose Plagiatsaffäre eines kleinen und bei seinen Studenten sehr beliebten FH-Profs an einer Provinz-Hochschule hier so breit getreten wird - anstatt sie zunächst einmal der eigentlich betroffenen Uni Innsbruck zur Klärung zu überlassen." [... this completely inconsequential plagiarism affair concerning a small and very beloved professor at an FH in a provincial college is being so widely discussed instead of waiting for the concerned University of Innsbruck to clear up the matter. -- dww]

This does, I suppose, make the German and Austrian situation crystal clear. There are far too many people in German and Austrian academia who do not understand what academic integrity is about and are completely unwilling to take action of any sort. Why don't the people who wrote decent theses in law at the University of Innsbruck get vocal? 

If at first you don't succeed....

VroniPlag Wiki case #42, is fascinating. It seems that this law thesis was submitted to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2000.  There was so much plagiarism to be found that the submitter was strongly encouraged to withdraw the thesis, which he apparently did.

The next year, a new version of the thesis was submitted to the University of Innsbruck in Austria (after all, they do speak German there, too). There it was accepted without question. VroniPlag Wiki has currently documented plagiarism on over 20 % of the pages. One of the major sources is the standard textbook on English law. The other is a thesis on a very similar topic from 1969. Many of the argumentation chains used strangely do not address any of the law commentary or court decisions that took place since then, which is odd for a dissertation prepared at the turn of the century.

The author, as is usual, insists that he used footnotes. Of course he did, but it is not made clear that the entire argumentation was lifted with slight changes from the sources. The University of Innsbruck announced that it was looking into legal aspects regarding the Austrian blogger who called attention to the work published on VroniPlag Wiki, not the author of the dissertation, who is currently employed as a professor in Germany.

At least the Austrian press is jumping on this. It seems that cases are only promptly addressed when the glaring light of the press is shown into the dark cellars of academia. There is an interesting parallel to the year 1794 (!) in the Kaiserlicher Priviligierter Reichsanzeiger:

"Man macht oft sehr unwürdige Leute zu Doctoren und Licentiaten, besonders in den Rechten und in der Medicin. Die Facultisten, welche von dieser Schöpfung aus Nichts einige Einnahmen haben, entschuldigen sich damit, wenn man ihnen darüber Vorwürfe machen will; daß, wenn sie auch den unwissenden Candidaten hätten abweisen wollen, derselbe noch einige 30 andere Facultäten in Deutschland würde angetroffen haben, von welchen sich gewiß einige daraus würden eine Ehre und Freude gemacht haben, den Herrn Candidaten zu krönen"
(Often, quite dishonorable persons are made doctors and licentiates, especially in law and medicine. The faculties, that have income from this creation out of nothing, excuse themselves when faced with accusations with that statement that if they would send the candidates away, they would find another 30 faculties in Germany of which some would be pleased and honored to crown these candidates. [translation dww])

Kaiserlich privilegirter Reichs-Anzeiger, 2 Januar 1794, S. 8

Update: Translation, typos, link to source added

Hamburg doctorate rescinded, court case pending

Apparently, the University of Hamburg rescinded the doctorate in law of one of cases documented on the VroniPlag Wiki at some time in the recent past, as reported by the Hamburger Abendblatt. They report on the complexities surrounding this case that involve lawyers suing lawyers over lawyers fighting other lawyers. But no matter what the circumstances -- a thesis that has so many text parallels, often covering more than half of the page on over 86 % of the pages,  is extremely problematic. The findings page lists the most important text parallels.

VroniPlag Wiki - Case 27 again from Münster

VroniPlag Wiki has published the 27th case on its home page, again a doctoral dissertation from the University of Münster in law. This author of this dissertation, as was the author of the 26th case, was a co-author of the law textbook that VroniPlag Wiki put up as the 25th case. The text parallels in case 27 are different from the ones in case 26. Where the latter had a lot of identical text, the former often has what is termed a "pawn sacrifice". The source is given, but the extent of the text that was taken is not made clear.

Münster was also the university where a duplicate dissertation in the medical faculty was discovered by chance by someone researching an article for the Wikipedia. They also granted a dissertation in medicine on the basis of a four page article co-authored by the doctoral advisor.

It seems that the law and medicine faculties there might need a refresher course on good scientific practice. I hope that the university makes it very clear what steps they are taking to insure that future dissertations do not include plagiarisms.

A curious article about law doctorates

The online journal of law at the Humboldt University of Berlin published an article in their fourth issue this year: Der juristische Doktortitel (The law doctoral title). The authors are listed as Prof. Dr. Rainer Schröder / Dr. Angela Klopsch.

VroniPlag Wiki/ GuttenPlag Wiki researchers noted the article, that also mentions the group, and commented on May 10, 2012, that a portion of the article is taken verbatim with a few changes from an article that appeared in the daily Die Welt on June 20, 2011, written by someone that is not listed as an author.

The blog jurabilis discussed this on May 11, 2012 and included links to visualizations of the plagiarism (1 - 2). Without a comment, the article suddenly obtained a * in the author list, with the star listing names of people who worked on the article. Quotation marks were also placed around the verbatim parts - but the changes that were made were not made clear, so they are now marked as being part of the quotation, which is not the case.

Today, Rainer Schröder published a comment on his home page about the situation. It seems the editor (perhaps Word?) is at fault. They were using change mode while writing, had lots of diagrams and tables (the statistical material is really interesting), and that crashed a lot. It seems, that when the editor crashes, it takes the quotation marks with it. This is a rather feeble excuse, and not one I would accept from students. If we are using modern technology, we have to learn how to make notes and how to reference texts properly.

And maybe disable CTRL+C CTRL+V while writing?

Wissenschaftsbetrug - Scientific Misconduct

I was at the German National Library the other day picking up some material on a plagiarism case and I casually riffled through the catalogs as I am wont to do. I found a very interesting dissertation from the University of Zürich in Switzerland:

Völger, Marion: Wissenschaftsbetrug - Strafrechtliche Aspekte - unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Missbrauchs staatlicher Forschungsförderung. Schulthess, 2004. ISBN: 3725548129

The dissertation is quite interesting, even for non-lawyers. The author first gives a good overview of definitions for scientific misconduct and an analysis of how scientific enquiry works in the first place. She uses a number of cases that have come to light in recent years to illustrate her points.

Then she goes into the legal aspects: University law, criminal law, all sorts of other legal bits and pieces. She focuses, of course, on Swiss law and explains the complicated system of research financing in Switzerland.

She basically comes to the conclusion that there is not much that one can do, although certain aspects of scientific misconduct could be covered by certain laws. There is a nice summary (in German) at http://archiv.ethlife.ethz.ch/articles/campuslife/betrugundrecht.html.

Plagiarism is "usual"?

A troubling letter from the district attorney in Darmstadt about the case of Axel Wirth. There is a bit of controversy here in Germany about this law school professor in Darmstadt. A newish law book was taken from the shelves when it was discovered that the 100 page chapter published under the name of this professor was extremely similar to another book - similar to the point of word-for-word copy without attribution.

The chapter was deemed a plagiarism - but the flak hit one of the professor's assistants, who apparently "wrote" the chapter for his boss. Seems the boss did not check it out too thoroughly before adding his name - this process is called "honorary authorship" and is found ethically troubling in many circles. But both the ombud for good scientific practice at the university as well as the aforementioned district attorney say that this is standard operating procedure at universities.

It does seem to be that way, as the same sort of hubbub is on over at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Hans-Peter Schwintowski published a book with a lot of non-footnoted material and "quotes". The book has also been removed from the shelves. At least this colleague will be looking into the matter and fixing things, but he does mention that the publisher was unhappy with "all those footnotes".

The point of footnotes is so that the reader who so desires can follow the arguments back to the source. And one writes in one's own words, not the words of others.

At least at the HU there is still the committee looking into the situation. But what troubles me is the nonchalance with which colleagues who do not need to be assembling plagiarisms seem to be using them. We need a discussion about a culture of quoting in Germany, and we need it right now.