Plagiarism seems to be running high

Yesterday my TA caught a case of a student plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Ho hum, happens all the time. Then I found the recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on an exposé by Alan Sokal (of the famous bogus postmodern physics paper in the journal Social Text), who, together with a student at the University of Zagreb, exposed a case of plagiarism by U.S. political scientist Frank Fischer. Its an interesting read, but for some masochistic reason (probably because of the Wikipedia incident) I waded through the 202 comments on the paper. I recommend those to anyone interested in issues of academic plagiarism, since there are all sorts of ideas, insights, and opinions there (including some possible hijinx by anonymous posters). One link in the comments led to a blog devoted to plagiarism in dissertations at Ohio State University (and you thought THIS blog was narrow!). Wow, some wild stuff (mostly in Engineering, although one case in Anthropology, leading to withdrawal of the degree).

It seems so often that university officials try to sweep things under the carpet when faculty plagiarism or scientific fraud take place. There was a case of this at my former university, and in the end not only the plagiarist looked bad, but the university administration was tarnished. And now the Mark Hauser episode at Harvard (if you don't know about this one, just google his name).

My favorite student plagiarism case was a C or D student whose term paper (on the reliability of Bernal Diaz as a source on Aztec society) started out, "The crescent flag of the Moors had flown over Spain for seven centuries..." I searched "crescent flag of the Moors" (back in Hot-Bot days, pre-Google), and Bingo!, the entire paper was lifted from a history website at the University of Iowa. And then a student essay once sounded strangely familiar to me (did I just read this in an earlier essay? I thought) until I realized I was reading my own prose.........

Academic standards are important, whether among our students, our colleagues, or ourselves. All this news about plagiarism and scientific fraud is depressing. If you haven't read "On Being a Scientist" by the National Academy of Sciences, you should read it now, and you should give it to your grad students and advanced undergrads. The new edition is a free download, well worth the effort.

National Academy of Sciences
    2009    On Being A Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research. 3rd ed. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC.  http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12192.

Elsevier published fake journals

These comments are from Peter Suber's Open Access News, Monday May 11, 2009

"Elsevier confirms 6 fake journals; more comments Bob Grant, Elsevier published 6 fake journals, The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted."

[Elsevier called these pseudo-journals "sponsored article publications." --MES]

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"When is peer review not peer view? (hint: when Merck pays Elsevier), Small Gray Matters, May 8, 2009.

... The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide. Any guesses as to whether Elsevier will rethink that stance following this fiasco? ..."

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Peter Murray-Rust, Trust in scientific publishing, A Scientist and the Web , May 9, 2009.

... So – as many have noted – here is a commercial company which has campaigned to rubbish Open Access as “junk science” behaving in a manner which totally destroys any trust in their ethics and practice. I have no option but to say that I now cannot absolutely trust the ethical integrity of every piece of information in Elsevier journals.
The need for Open, trusted, scientific data and discourse is now clear. The scientific societies are well placed to help us make the change from closed paper to open trusted semantic digital. They clearly need a business model that transforms the new qualities into a revenue stream. This will not be easy but it has to be tried – there is no alternative. Some of the modern tools will help – the ability to mashup, aggregate, etc. will lead to new forms of high-quality information that will have monetary value. Certified validated information will lead to productivity gains and may be a valuable commodity. ...

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Archaeology, of course, does not have anywhere near the level of commercial incentives that can generate this kind of unethical practice in journal publication. But what about junk edited volumes? Could commercial incentives trump scientific value for some of these? I remain puzzled at the program of evidently non-peer-reviewed edited books put out by Nova Scientific Publishers, but I have no evidence that commercial factors outweigh scientific factors in these books. And most professionals could tell a story or two about cases where journal peer review went out the window for one reason or another. But then we don't have a venue for discussing such activities. I hear from one or two colleagues each year with complaints about unethical or capricious or bizarre behavior by editors, reviewers, publishers, and others. Other than give personal advice, there is not much I can do because I typically lack both definitive data and some kind of official status that might warrant meddling in other peoples' business.