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.

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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?

New Customers for Old Software

One of my searchbots turned up this nugget of wisdom today from December 14, 2007:
"Auch die Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien nutzt den Plagiarism-Finder: Abgeschriebene Arbeiten aus dem Internet aufspüren!" (The Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration is also using Plagiarism-Finder: Find papers copied from the internet!)

It is published by a "news service", PresseEcho, but it reads more like the advertising for the product, copied liberally from the product home page: http://www.plagiarism-finder.de/.

The amusing thing is that it gives the product version 1.3, which is actually the old version we tested in 2004. There was a version 2.0 announced for September, but it has not yet seen the light of day, as far as I know. We offered to test a version, old or new, during our tests in September, but the company declined. This was a shame, as they were the top candidate in 2004.

The tip-off to a journalist worth his salt would be that the most recent "news" on the software site is from 2004, and a screen shot from a 2006 TV interview. This is not really bleeding edge technology.

That the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, supposedly the largest business school in Europe, does not have the business sense to check if they are purchasing recent software and then advertises the fact that they have purchased 55 copies of it says perhaps more about the school that all their fancy web sites and brochures.

The "news" site itself seems to just be an advertising honey pot. There are context ads and a lot of advertising links in the footer of the kind that got the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" cut down a page rank or three. So let's give the University the benefit of the doubt and assume the "news" agency dug out an ancient press notice to recycle.

But no: I went off to search the business school site using their Google site search tool. Interesting: the first link is for a review of a paper that is an apparent plagiarism. I wonder if the author of the review knows that his paper is indexed in Google? They do have a nice page on plagiarism detection, that has a link to my portal and mentions that they use Plagiarism-Finder.

A bit further down the list we find the school a paragon of full disclosure, with a list of their software purchases (including the price paid) for 2004. From the looks of this, they only purchased one full license then. The prices paid for other software will surely be of interest to other schools. Continuing on down the list served by Google we find the purchases for 2007: indeed, they paid 5.775,00 € for 55 licenses in October. And a big chunk of cash to Microsoft, but that is another story.

My suggestion to the business school: Try and get a refund for getting sold old software, and turn Google Search off on your web site - or at least keep it out of sensitive information directories. You have some, uh, interesting stuff hung out, and the whole world can see.

StrikePlagiarism

I was at the Online Educa this past week and at my school's stand for 2 hours to talk with people about plagiarism detection. The only one to come was a guy from the Polish company StrikePlagiarism, who wanted to assure me that they had immediately sat down after my test and the programmers had set some parameters to be a bit stronger and now they could handle all of my plagiarisms.

I don't really believe that, but this is what all companies are saying. They are new, improved.

My point still is that these are not plagiarism detection systems, but similarity detection systems. The determination of whether or not a text is a plagiarism must be the sole responsibility of the teacher and/or the school administration (for determining the consequences). You cannot delegate responsibility for something this delicate to a machine.

He asked to be included in "next year's test". Ah, how I wish the funding fairy would stop by with a little pot of gold so I could actually do this - make 10 more plagiarisms and redo the tests. I don't need enough money to make a major grant, but more than I get in my yearly allotment. One must to expensive research, it seems, but that is another question.

Menschenraub

I tend to have my movie critiques on my private blog, but this German TV thriller shown last week on public television is about plagiarism, so I will discuss it here.

Menschenraub, the theft of a person, is what the word "plagiarism" means. When Martial, a Latin poet in the 1st century, discovered that a fellow poet had taken some of his poems and published them under his own name, he called him a "Plagiarius", someone who steals children. He felt that his poems were the children of his thought.

This "thriller" is not thrilling, possibly because the topic of plagiarism is quite boring when shown on TV. In an institute for forensic medicine and thanatology at the University of Hamburg there are all sorts of plagiarisms being found - and of course, deaths, otherwise it would not be a thriller. A teacher found a plagiarism in a student's work and exposed it in front of the entire class, announcing that she will be ex-matriculated. She kills herself.

This teacher is soon found dead, and it turns out that he has found out that the doctoral thesis of a colleague is a translation plagiarism of a scholar's work in the former Yugoslavia. Another colleague learns of this plagiarism and he too is soon dead. The plagiarist ends up committing suicide during a police interrogation to protect his girlfriend (also a colleague), who was the real murderer.

As an aside, one of the police detectives is "writing" a piece for a criminal justice journal, and he is typing in some other paper to be published in his own name.

Next to this very contrived situation - an entire institute dead within days because of allegations of plagiarism - there are so many details which are just wrong. I know of only one German university that actually ex-matriculates students because of plagiarism, and that does not happen just because a professor writes a letter. They go on at length about how much a professor gets paid, but they use the new pay scale and are using the lowest one (which pays 3700 Euros a month) but saying that this is 7000 Euros. This is the idea many people get of salaries of professors, but it is not true. Most are happy to get 4000. But honestly - who cares?

Plagiarism is an important topic for scientific discussion: what is it, how do we avoid it, how do we handle plagiarism when we find it. But as the topic of a thriller it just does not pack much of a punch.

Plagiarism of Swiss Medical Paper

The "Tages-Anzeiger", a Swiss German-language daily newspaper, published an account on Nov. 7, 2007 (page 36) of the problems encountered by Berne medical researcher Werner Pichler.

A paper that he wrote about immunology for the magazine "Allergy" was published at a later date by the Czech researcher Marcela Z. in "Folia Biologica". The papers are almost identical.

The problem is, that Pichler had submitted the article to "Lancet", and it was rejected there. One of the peer reviews done on his manuscript was done by a researcher leading a laboratory in which Marcela Z. was working.

Luckily, he managed to have his paper published before Marcela Z. published hers - with co-authors who now say that the paper was published in their name without their knowledge.

The discovery of the plagiarism was by chance. Another researcher who was aware of Pichler's work happened on Marcela Z.'s article while researching in online databases.

Marcela Z. is said to have been terminated from her position at the University of Prague, and proceedings on her doctorate are said to have been stopped. She was unavailable to the newspaper for comment.

Kitchen Radio on Plagiarism

I was the weekly guest on the Berlin "Kitchen Radio" on the topic of plagiarism. This is a podcast that has been produced by four German radio journalists for a couple of years.

They have some simple recording equipment and an interesting table microphone. They invite a guest to their kitchen, start the recorder, introduce everyone, and then just talk like as if we were having coffee together for an hour.

They said that in their "day jobs" they are only out for the sound bites, have just a few seconds to explain their topics. They wanted to experiment with simple in-depth interviews, but also to see how this informal format could work.

I found it relatively chaotic with four journalists asking the usual journalist questions all at once, so I often had the feeling of not having answered a question thoroughly. We got off on quite a number of tangents, but one of the journalists kept focusing the group, bringing us back to the topic of plagiarism.

They are proponents of Creative Commons, of the creative re-mix, and didn't really understand what all the fuss about plagiarism was about. I do feel that I was able to explain why authorship is so important in science.

Listening to the podcast I find it remarkably easy to listen to, much of what I felt was chaotic comes across well in the podcast. If you understand German and have an hour - listen in, the link is in the first paragraph!

Dissertation revoked at the University of Dortmund, Germany

The German newspaper FAZ reports on October 20/21 2007 in an article by Sebastian Balzter "Aus der Praxis der Plagiatoren" on a case I have been following for a full two years now.

Julia Kleinhaus (a pseudonym) wrote her Diploma-Thesis in 1999 at the business department of the University of Dortmund. She handed in the 300 page treatise on a diskette, as requested by her advisor, who was working on his dissertation. Many years later she happened upon the guy's dissertation, and was shocked to find that the first 200 pages or so were exactly her pages - at times with the typographical errors intact. Only minor changes had been made (renumbering diagrams, occasional paragraphs thrown in). She wrote to me to ask what she should do.

I advised her to follow the rules laid down about 10 years ago by the German research foundation, DFG. She filed a formal complaint with the university ombudsman. She soon began to get anonymous, threatening emails. She informed the police, but they are so busy in Germany looking for terrorists and what not that nothing happened. She changed her e-mail address and was eventually invited to a hearing, almost a year after her complaint.

Another year passed before she finally learned (and this only because the reporter put the thumbscrews on the university, apparently) that the dissertation had been revoked. But the plagiarist - who is currently enjoying his title somewhere out there in the German industrial landscape where such a title brings a lot of status - is taking the university to court.

The bizarre thing is that the court will not have to decide upon whether or not a plagiarism occurred. That should be clear to anyone who even just glances at the two works. No, he is suing the university in the hopes that they made some sort of error during the process of revoking the dissertation, so that he can then keep the title, as it would then have been wrongly revoked. Universities often lose court cases like this in Germany, because someone along the line always makes an error, and highly-paid lawyers can often find out what it was.

I find it distasteful that it takes over two years to investigate this. I find it disgusting that a so blatant plagiarist can take the university to court and be judged not on the content, but only on the process. Why can't someone explain to this man why he is not worthy of the title he uses? And why can't the university grant this woman a doctorate? Not an honorary doctorate, but a real one. She did the work, she should get the honors.