Just an Erratum?

At the beginning of the month I reported on the retraction of a paper by N. Memon by the Springer Verlag. Retraction Watch then learned that Springer had retracted the retraction, making it into an Erratum instead:

Hmm, can a scientist publish a paper and a publisher sell it when a table has been copied without permission? Most particularly, why was the retraction retracted when Springer had already been informed over a year ago that this paper was a plagiarism? It reproduced material that the authors had also published with IEEE and which has been deemed a serious level 1 plagiarism there with the paper being retracted in January 2013 for being a greater than 50% plagiarism of prior work.

VroniPlag Wiki researchers applied the fragmentation technique to the paper in order to visualize the plagiarism (PDF) in a perhaps more understandable manner.

The colours show the type of plagiarism diagnosed:

• grau=Komplettplagiat: the source of the text parallel is not given, the copy is verbatim.
• rot=Verschleierung: the source of the text parallel is not given, the copied text will be somewhat modified.
• gelb=Bauernopfer: the source of the text parallel is mentioned, but the extent and/or closeness of the copying is not made clear by the reference. 

The modified bits in red are a fascinating read:

"Joe talks to Jack" in the source becomes "Atta talks with Khalid" to give the text a better terrorist feel:

Original Katz et al. (2004)

Copy

A paper about criminals gets reworded to address terrorists in the introduction:

Xu & Chen (2003)

Copy

Why would a scientific publisher (and not a junk journal or other shady operation) not swiftly remove such a paper from their online offerings once they learn of it? They seem to be condoning it by playing down the seriousness of the offense, just speaking of an erratum and only focusing on the table. Do scientific standards and aspects of quality not count for anything these days?

Update: Link added, type 1 -> level 1, attempt to fix the formatting. Thanks to G. Hindemith!

Identifying Scam Publishers

I happened on an oldish site today, Preditors & Editors, that contains a listing of things for writers to look out for when they are considering publishing. Many of their general rules for spotting a scam publisher fit nicely to vanity publishers that abound in the scientific realm:

• Openly advertises for writers in print or online publications or both.
• The publisher claims that it's seeking to publish first-time authors.
• Openly claims that it's not a vanity or subsidy publisher.
• Claims that it has a new business model that will bring success, but never explains why successful publishers aren't utilizing it.
• Claims that the established publishers and published writers are trying to block new writers from being published.
  [...]

It's a long list, followed by a list of properties of a scam literary agent. They also have a list of publishers and other useful links for writers. They also appear to be under legal attack from people who don't like what David Kuzminski, the owner of the site, published.

Predatory Publishing

Moshe Y. Vardi, Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM, has a nice editorial called "Predatory Scholarly Publishing" in the July 2012 issue. He names a junk journal and a mock conference and then notes that we shouldn't single out Elsevier for predatory publishing -- so many of the publishers today are guilty of focusing more on making money than on science.

He also refers to the Scholarly Open Access blog, run by Jeffery Beall, who has written extensively about junk science. I just love the entry on the "Six new vanity presses", in which he discusses:

• Intellectual Archive: "This site is an 'institutional repository' for people who ought to be institutionalized." 
• Wudpecker Research Journals: From India, that name does stand out
• Academy & Industry Research Collaboration Center:  A combined conference and journal from India. Just what the doctor ordered to meet your two publications a year.
• MASAUM Network: Only £200 for accepted papers
• Centre For Info Bio Technology (CIBTech): The spelling on their web page is apparently adventurous 
• Pelagia Research Library: does not say where it is located, but since it accepts payment in Rupees, Beall assumes that it is located there.

Another entry in Beall's blog on a Ridiculous New Publisher sums it up nicely:

"The open-access movement started with good will and good intentions. Unfortunately, it has now been co-opted by a bunch of corrupt schemers who threaten to destroy the foundation of scholarly communication."

We need to spread the word -- and find some way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

German Libraries Avoiding Fake Publishers

This blog has reported a number of times on what I term fake or write-only publishers (1 - 2 - 3). I am happy to report that German university libraries are fighting back - they are trying to avoid purchasing expensive rubbish.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that after some libraries realized that they were purchasing printed copies of material from the Wikipedia or dodgy bachelor's theses at outrageous prices, they have begun only purchasing the books - often badly produced print-on-demand volumes - with the possibility of returning the book. And they are keeping lists of the subpublishers that are springing up to disguise who is really behind the publishers. If a book is to be ordered from such a publisher, the librarians are asking back if the person ordering the book is aware of the common practices of these publishers.

There is a long list of publishers that engage in practices like this:

• Verlag VDM (Verlag Dr. Müller),  Saarbrücken
• Alphascript Publishing 
• Betascript Publishing
• Doyen Verlag
• Verlag Classic Edition
• Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften
• Lambert Academic Publishing

• (General)Books LLC
• Bucher LLC
• GRIN-Verlag

There are a lot of good sources online about these publishers (these are mostly in German):

General:

• Tobias Bolsmann: „Verlage verkaufen Kopien von Wikipedia-Texten.“ In: Der Westen. Portal der WAZ-Mediengruppe, Oktober 2010
• Corinna Nohn: „Der große Wikineppp. Dubiose Online-Lexika“ In: sueddeutsche.de vom 30.09.2010
• Thomas Thiel: “Der Marketplace soll es richten. Wikipedia und Amazon”, 27. September 2010

VDM and their imprints:

• Persönliche Seite des Wikipedia-Nutzers “Prime Hunter” in der engl. Wikipedia, mit zahlreichen Links, September 2010 
• Jürger Plieninger im netbib-Blog zu Lambert AP, August 2010
• Blog von Chris Rand: „The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing”, Februar 2010
• Victoria Strauss, The Writer Beware Blogs zu VDM, September 2009
• Klaus Graf: “Mehr zum Verlag Dr. Müller“, samt Reaktion des Verlegers, Juni 2009
• Meike Strüber: „Einband fürs Ego: Noch nie war es so einfach, die eigene Abschlussarbeit nach dem Studium als Buch herauszubringen. Die stolzen Autoren werden jedoch in den seltensten Fällen reich und berühmt“, in: sueddeutsche.de vom 11. Juli 2008
• Diskussion in INETBIB (mit den Schwerpunkten Autorenanwerbung des Verlags, Pflichtexemplarrecht), Januar 2008:
• Blog des ehem. Fachreferenten Philosophie J.G. Eberhardt (UB Erlangen)  zum Thema Reprints des VDM-Verlags, Februar 2007 – Mai 2008; inkl. Drohungen des Verlags: Siehe auch: URL: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4442450/

(General) Books LLC and Bucher LLC

• Andreas Weigel: „Denken Sie, dass Sie das Buch verbessern kann?“, September 2010    
• Andreas Weigel: „Zweifelhafte „James Joyce“-Publikation mit Austriaca-Schwerpunkt“ [with many pictures of the publication], September 2010
• Discussion in the German Wikipedia about the copyright questions involved with publications from Bucher LLC
• Diskussion von Urheberrechtsfragen in der dtspr. Wikipedia:

 Hopefully, more and more libraries will realize that these are not legitimate publishers, and quit ordering books from them.

Thanks to C.W. for the linklist!

A Book Forbidden

I owe this blog at least two book reports that I have not gotten around to on account of semester pressures. I'll take them one at a time.

The German law professor Volker Rieble published a thin blue book entitled "Das Wissenschaftsplagiat - Vom Versagen eines Systems" in April of this year. It is fascinating in that it names names. I ordered my copy immediately, fearing that it would be removed from the market. And so it has happened - a court injunction has forced the book out of print, effectively forbidding it. The publisher, Vittorio E. Klostermann writes:

Two law professors who were named in Volker Rieble's book and whom he criticized on their citation methods, have obtained an injunction from the Hamburg regional court (Landgericht) against this publisher. We are not allowed to publish certain passages from the book. The currently bound and sold copies of the book are, however, not included in the injunction. This has made it easier for this publisher to forgo an expensive legal battle and to accept the injunction as the final legal arrangement. 

As I am not a lawyer, I do not want to discuss the subtle points of law that both of the plaintiffs brought forth to establish their cases. Why the court decided the way they did is not known, because an injunction does not come with justification. I have learned that a German court can forbid a statement without giving a reason. I don't find this a good thing. It would have been useful if the Hamburg judges had at least given a brief sketch of their reasoning. Then we would know if they had read the book, or only the passages in question, and how the judges interpret the passages in the context of the book.

I decided to publish Volker Rieble's book because I found his concern to be important - pointing out problematic conventions in the scientific community. His goal is scholarly honesty: Not (only) plain-old plagiarism, but also the bad habit of using other people's intellectual property without properly identifying the author is problematic. For the various practices of this kind he introduced the term "Wissenschaftsplagiat", scholarly plagiarism, and used it in the title of his book. He explains this thoroughly from page 80 onwards. 

The debate about the things Rieble writes about does not belong in court, but in the glaring light of the professional scholarly public. That the scientific discussion that we are attempting to further in publishing our books could be gagged under threat of punitive action has happened for the first time in the 80 years of the existence of this publishing house.

But we have known, at least since the FAZ reported on June 2, 2010 about the Weigend review of the book by Calvo-Goller about the International Criminal Court (the Chronicle reported in English), that scholarly free speech is threatened.

Many of the cases Rieble discusses are, of course, from the area of law. Many of these cases were new to me, and I am thankful for the good footnotes that he uses to document the cases. My only quarrel is that he has a bizarre bit at the end where he finds Open Access to be responsible for the increase of plagiarism, something I cannot follow. Open Access helps us to better find those guilty of plagarism! The texts are open, dated, and the authorship is clear. I think we need more Open Access and not less. I have an essay on this topic that will be published the end of 2010, more on this later.

It is sad to see academic discourse being subjected to the vagaries of legal decisions.

Massive Write-Only Publications

I was looking for Donald Knuth's wonderful book 3:16 on Amazon when I stumbled on this book for sale:

The 2007 Report on Industrial and Agriculture Twine Less Than 3/16-Inch Diameter Made from Manmade Fibers: World Market Segmentation by City (Taschenbuch)

Now that's a mouthful. But what I found interesting was the price: 794,99€.
I suppose they sell a maximum of one. And it's in stock. And since there is no selling rank, I'm assuming there hasn't been a sale yet, although there is a used one up for grabs.

On closer inspection I find the publisher: XXX. Ah, yes. I've blogged about this publisher before. I call this write-only publishing, only useful for padding resumes. I suppose the price is so high so no one purchases it and then finds out that it only has blank pages or worse.


The summary looks like it was produced by a machine:

"... In what follows, I summarize the economic potential for the world's major cities for "industrial and agriculture twine less than 3/16-inch diameter made from manmade fibers" for the year 2007. The goal of this report is to report my findings on the real economic potential, or what an economist calls the latent demand, represented by a city when defined as an area of dominant influence. [...] For many items, latent demand is clearly observable in sales, as in the case for food or housing items. Consider, however, the category "satellite launch vehicles". Clearly, there are no launch pads in most cities of the world. However, the core benefit of the vehicles (e.g. telecommunications, etc.) is "consumed" by residents or industries within the world's cities."

 3/16 inch twine? Latent demand? Satellite launch vehicles?.

I checked out the author, Philip M. Parker. Goodness, what a busy man. There are 107.181 entries in Amazon's database! The first is a history book, the proceeds of which will go to finance Webster's online dictionary?

Expanding the cover I find him listed as a professor and a Ph.D., a "Chaired professor of Management Science INSEAD (Singapore and Fontainebleau, France)".

INSEAD has a web site, although there is some discussion on web sites as to whether or not this is a diploma mill. And there is a Philip M. Parker there, a professor for marketing. He lists only 7 books on his web site, none about 3/16 inch twine. He is also listed as responsible for the site "Webster's Online Dictionary", apparently the name is in the public domain.

Ah, the Wikipedia tells us what's up: He has a patent on producing publications by software, using the print-on-demand publisher XXX There have been articles in the New York Times and the Financial Times Deutschland.

This is absurd. These are not niche products. They are spam. They are clogging up databases. And it proves to me that a reference on a resume that lists XXX as the publisher is not worth the paper it may be printed on.

A Lesson Plan for Teaching about Plagiarism

I purchased a copy of the book "Student Plagiarism in an Online World - Problems and Solutions", XXX, 2008 by Tim S. Roberts (Ed.) for my research group despite the outrageous price (180$). 

I have previously blogged my opinion that XXX is a write-only publisher, and when I hold the book in my hands, it becomes even clearer. The book is hard-cover, in an impossibly large format, and very badly bound. At that price, I want a book that is well-bound and lies flat for use. There is no trace of the promised "free" online access to the text, which is a shame, as I could have used it today. 

Many of the chapters are long-winded or repetitive, that is, they could have used some tighter editing. But there are quite a number of good ideas to be found here and the references sections are quite extensive. 

The chapter by Frankie Wilson and Kate Ippolito, supposedly of Brunel University in the UK, although I find no home page or email for them there, contains an excellent lesson plan for a seminar about plagiarism. 

I decided at short notice to ditch my normal slideshow about plagiarism that I give to our first semester students and gave it a try, although the materials promised to be at a particular school page are not available (they return a 404). 

Our session is 90 minutes, and since we had not had an introductiory session yet, I spent 30 minutes with introductions of me and the students among themselves. This helped break the ice - everyone had already had to stand up and say something. 

We began by collecting definitions on index cards from the students on what their definition of plagiarism is. I made this into an individual exercise, in the plan given this is to be group work. I read them aloud and collected the high points on the board. About a quarter of the 32 people participating could not come up with a definition, and many focussed their definition on product plagiarism only. 

We then began to discuss "where to draw the line". We did this in plenum instead of in small groups, and this ended up being a lively discussion with excellent questions being voiced from the students. A major concern was: but how do I know what the source is, I just "know" something, I don't remember where I read it. We had a good conversation about note-taking and finding confirming evidence for that which one thinks one knows. 

The last section dealt with plagiarism avoidance - how a paper gets developed (and I got some words in on that ancient thing called a l-i-b-r-a-r-y) and the different kinds of references: direct quotation, indirect quotation, secondary source. 

 I then distributed 10 magazines and books to groups and have them find how references are used in these. I chose a selection of magazines and books that have different reference structures. They were very quick to identify these, and spent a few minutes glancing through the material that they had. 

We needed just 60 minutes, although the discussions were going so well that I am sure that we could have made it much longer. I would have liked to have had the worksheet promised in the chapter, but the lesson plan is well enough done that it can easily be adapted. 

I will post an update if I manage to find the material, I have written to the school asking for current emails of the authors and/or a current URL for the material.

Book about Women Writers a Plagiarism

The Bavarian TV station Bayrischen Rundfunk reports (Skandal um "Verbrannte Dichterinnen") that the publisher Artemis & Winkler has withdrawn the book "Verbrannte Dichterinnen" (Women writers whose books were burned in the Third Reich) by Edda Ziegler after an accusation of plagiarism by the Munich scholar Hiltrud Häntzschel, who had published many books about these women.

Häntzschel found over 170 parts of the book that took her words, changing the syntax slightly or the verb tenses, but followed her publications very closely. The publisher agrees, and has withdrawn the unsold volumes. It has announced a reprint with footnotes.

Ziegler does not see what she did as plagiarism. She says she was just following the "rules of popular science writing". She used many quotes, but did not bother with footnotes, which are disdained by critics and the popular press.

"But does this give one a charter for copying?", BR asks. "How about doing one's own research, one's own concept, and one's own writing so as to avoid the footnotes?" Ziegler feels that she was just taking what she had read and putting it into a more readable form. BR does not consider this authorship.

BR has a 3:29 minute interview with both authors (in German) available online.

Write-only publications

Note 2022-12-20: A lawyer for the company has insisted that I delete this 15-year-old entry. Since it is an important discussion, I am removing the name of the company. In my opinion, however, if lawyers enter the picture we are no longer in the academic realm. I prefer discussion to deletion. I have, however, removed the comments, which quite actively discussed readers' experiences with the publisher.

---

A former student who is currently doing his dissertation at another school asked me yesterday if I had ever heard of the publisher XXX. They were spamming a database research mailing list asking people to write a chapter for a book. He just started his dissertation, but was pretty sure that you don't get asked anonymously by a publisher to write a book, but personally by some respected editor.

I clicked on the site and was surprised to see that they call themselves "XXX". I had never heard of this publisher before.

Okay, so maybe I don't read the right books. The topics looked interesting - E-Learning was right at the top, then I saw the prices in a very small print: $1,750.00 (6 volumes), $94.95, $565.00 (2 volumes), $165.00

Who in their right mind would pay prices like this? I surfed a little further, as I had never heard of any of the editors and authors of these books. The Wikipedia entry read just like the advertising blurb - and quoted only articles that reprint press releases by the company.

I looked for peer reviewed articles in the ACM Digital Library that quote some book published by this publisher - no results. That's odd. I can google people who have their publication lists online and include books published here, but I can't find any serious quotation of any of the books. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not there, it just means I can't find anything right off.

Is this a case of write-only publication? With the pressure to publish so high, I am wondering how we can tell if publishing houses are legitimate, or only there for people to pad their publication lists, much as these fake conferences that keep popping up in interesting vacation spots. Step up, pay your price, get your publication.

Since I sit on a number of search committees, how can we tell if the publication lists of the applicants are "real" publications and conference papers or not? I am beginning to see the point in citation lists, although they, too, are not very reliable.

Digging deeper into the XXX site I find that they offer free online access to the books to libraries who purchase one of the overpriced books. Ah, this seems to be the thing. The authors do seem to exist; however, they teach at minor schools. The business model seems to be: young academic writes book, publishes here, library purchases overpriced book, academic now has a book published, gets a new job at another university, has library there purchase book, etc. etc.

Any thoughts on this? Am I being too pessimistic? Is this the only way for non-major-players to get published these days?