June 21, 2012

A (Partial) Defense of Jonah Lehrer - The Atlantic

This isn't a defense of Jonah Lehrer in the sense of arguing that he's blameless for his fairly egregious pattern of "self-plagiarism" (or, as he might prefer to put it, his pattern of "high-fidelity recycling"). And I'm not addressing at all Lehrer's alleged instance of actual plagiarism, which is a much more serious matter. My only point is that the current journalistic environment encourages recycling, and renders his misdeeds less surprising than they'd have been in, say, 1987, when I was his age and had never heard the word "internet".
There are basically three new factors at play:
1) More than before, success in journalism is about sheer quantity of output. In 1987 if you named the top young (say, under age 35) pundits and essayists, a number of them were people averaging maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words a week of output, perhaps in the form of a single weekly column. Now the young superstars average more like 5,000, even 10,000 words a week, broken up into 10, 20, 25 pieces. If you're young and you want to keep getting noticed, you've pretty much got to produce at this volume, unless you're sitting at one of the handful of remaining elite perches (The New Yorker, The New York Times)--and even at these places, quantitative expectations are rising as writers like Ross Douthat, Paul Krugman, and Hendrik Hertzberg blog in addition to doing their traditional writing. (And if you are going to try to get by on merely a couple of thousand words a week, you'd better get at least another 1,500 words onto Twitter to make up for it.)
2) As quantitative expectations rise, and the old revenue model of journalism continues to melt, pay-per-word drops. If Slate's Matthew Yglesias was getting paid the effective per-word rate I got when I wrote a column for Slate upon its launch in 1996, he'd be making over a million dollars a year. Judging by his position on tax breaks for the rich, he's not.
3) As the above two factors have strengthened the incentive to recycle your work, the ethos of the web has made old lines blurrier and has made recycling seem less obviously wrong. Every day blog posts appear in the Huffington Post that also appear on one, two, three other sites. Do all of the versions of the post mention all the other versions? Sometimes, sure. But it's not like anyone throws a fit when they don't.
This isn't a lament. I doubt the old world of journalism was any better for society than the new world of journalism, and it was probably worse.
To be sure, the new emphasis on quantity means that a lot of low quality stuff gets produced (some of it by me, as you may have noticed!--though by current standards I'm not a high-volume producer). For that reason, among others, I'd probably feel more comfortable living in a world where you're expected to produce one or two polished, well-thought-out columns per week, columns that have benefited from editorial feedback.
But maybe I just need to heed the advice of Felix Salmon. Writing about the Lehrer case, he suggests that the problem lay in Lehrer's thinking of every blog post as the vehicle for delivering a fully formed idea. Better to think of a blog post as just a snapshot of the process of your thinking something through, says Salmon. Blogs should be "wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time."
Or, as my Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates put it:
"Journalism is hard, and a writer focused only on the end-product--on the reveal, on the key insight--is going to struggle. There should be some excitement about the hunt, about having your assumptions overturned and blown up. There should be some love for the process. The baker can't simply live for the look of amazement on the faces of those who behold his latest creation. There has to be some joy in actually baking the cake."

June 20, 2012

PM’s plagiarism scandal puts spotlight on culture of academic cheating in Romania - The Washington Post

Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty are endemic in Romania.
After communism fell in 1989 and Romania pursued free market reforms, a large number of private universities and institutes opened, offering what some say were spurious academic qualifications. Cheating starts early in Romania and is widely acknowledged as common in schools. Teachers are known to accept bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to students who copy during exams.
There have been widespread reports about cheating in university finals. Medical colleges have been accused of selling exam papers and questions in advance to students, eroding trust in doctors.
Ponta completed his doctorate in 2004 when he was a state secretary under former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, who has just been sentenced to two years in prison in a corruption case. Nastase has appealed and denies the allegations.
The Nature journalist who wrote the article said the science magazine published the allegations because of concerns about Romania’s academic integrity. >>>

Romania: Plagiarism Scandal Ensnares Prime Minister - The New York Times

Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been accused of plagiarizing half of his doctoral thesis. The science magazine Nature reported Monday that an anonymous whistle-blower had provided it with documents that indicate that more than half of Mr. Ponta’s 432-page thesis, written in 2004 on the International Criminal Court, was plagiarized from the work of two Romanian law scholars. Mr. Ponta denied the accusations, but addressed the issue on Tuesday by saying: “The only reproach I have is that I did not list authors at the bottom of each page, but put them in the bibliography at the end. If this is a mistake, then I am willing to pay for it.” His government less than two months old, Mr. Ponta has had to devote an exceptional amount of time to responding to allegations of academic misdeeds. His first education minister resigned on plagiarism accusations relating to a book about Romania’s entry into the European Union. His second quit soon afterward, also accused of copying academic work. Elsewhere in Europe, President Pal Schmitt of Hungary and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg of Germany resigned when accused of plagiarism.

The ethics of recycling content: Jonah Lehrer accused of self-plagiarism - Op-ed: Is it OK to reuse old work? That's a loaded question with many variables. - ArsTechnica

Jonah Lehrer has long been one of the rising stars of the science writing world. I was a huge fan of his work when he wrote for Wired (a sister publication of Ars) and was happy when he recently left for the New Yorker full-time (again, another Conde Nast publication). That continued rise might be imperiled now, however, after the discovery of several instances of Lehrer re-using earlier work he did for a different publication.
Yesterday morning, Jim Romenesko, a well-known media watcher, noticed striking similarities between a piece by Lehrer published last week in the New Yorker, and one that Lehrer wrote for the Wall Street Journal last October. The blogosphere being what it is, it wasn't long before others were digging.  More than a handful of other instances of this happening were quickly uncovered—to the extent that this should be seen as carelessness rather than misfortune. Writers beware: in the age of crowdsourcing, this sort of investigation is child's play.
A day later, and the Twittersphere being what it is, there's been much discussion on the topic. Can you really plagiarize yourself? Is it plagiarism to get paid to give talks that rehash work you've written? Is it plagiarism to give the same talk to different audiences? >>>

June 19, 2012

Romanian prime minister accused of plagiarism - The Guardian

Victor Ponta copied parts of his doctoral thesis from two law scholars, claims scientific journal
A scientific journal has claimed that Romania's new prime minister has copied large swaths of his doctoral thesis without proper attribution.
Nature said in a press release it had seen documents that indicated that more than half of Victor Ponta's 432-page thesis on the international criminal court was plagiarised from a work of two Romanian law scholars.
The state news agency, Agerpres, said Ponta denies the allegation and is offering to submit his work to "any kind of test". Ponta accused the Romanian president, Traian Basescu, a bitter political rival, of orchestrating the attack.
Ponta became prime minister on 7 May after the previous government was ousted after losing a confidence vote. Two of his appointments for education minister stepped down after they were accused of plagiarism

Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself? - Slate

On Tuesday morning, media watcher Jim Romenesko caught Jonah Lehrer stealing. The victim: Jonah Lehrer. The newly minted New Yorker staff writer’s June 12 blog post “Why Smart People Are Stupid” copied, at times word for word, three paragraphs from Lehrer’s 2011 Wall Street Journal story “The Science of Irrationality.” A few hours later, New York’s Joe Coscarelli and writer Jacob Silverman discovered a bunch more instances in which Lehrer reheated his leftovers. The New Yorker has now appended editors’ notes to all five posts on Lehrer’s new blog Frontal Cortex and to an additional post he wrote about Steve Jobs in 2011. Those notes acknowledge that “paragraphs,” “portions,” or “details” originally appeared in writing that Lehrer had done elsewhere.>>>

June 17, 2012

Turkish mock conferences - Copy, Shake, and Paste

I've been sent an article from Hürriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, apparently about mock conferences and Turkish scientists. Google translate didn't do such a hot job on translating - anyone out there read enough Turkish to translate?

Update 2012-06-18: Here's a translation, thank you to my anonymous translator! I've made some minor changes, if I have anything very wrong, please let me know!
2nd update: fixed two minor problems

He who plunks down money gets made professor (From Hürriyet Newspaper 12 December 2010)
WASET is a very stylish site, also it impresses with its content: links with international refereed journals, international conferences that organized almost in every subject... But if you delve into the issue a bit, you learn that this site only shows as if your paper was published in a journal which it is not, and it also shows like as if you attended the international conferences, which you didn't. He or she who plunks their money can add them to his/her CV and becomes a associate professor or a professor.
Actually what is done is simple: lets assume that it is time for your associate professorship or professorship. There is no way that it will occur automatically, you have to attend conferences or publish papers in refereed journals, so you can add these to your CV. Although there are 25.000 refereed journal in the world, you are not the type who bothers him/herself, you benefit enough from the culture of “is not there an easy way to do this, bro'?”
The “World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology” which can be found at http://waset.org is such a site. When you get into it, you come across a stylish, serious page. Information given, offered programs are kind of that can't be disregarded. This site, allows you to add “articles published in international refereed journals and international conferences” to your CV for a fee.
FAMILY TROUBLING TÜBİTAK
The site is backed by former science teacher Cemal Ardıl, his daugter Ebru Ardıl, and his son Bora Ardıl is also helping him. These names are very interesting. Science teacher for twenty years Cemal Ardıl introduced himself as Dr/PhD, and because of this TÜBİTAK [The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey] chair Prof. Nüket Yetiş opened a investigation about him in ethical committee. After that because of using the name TÜBİTAK without permission, she gave them a notarized protest certificate. Also TÜBİTAK withdrew support from Çanakkale 18 Mart University until bogus conference, bogus journal problem could be solved. But they continued with their activity. Guess who is the one with most articles in WASET? Cemal Ardıl with 46 articles is the one with most articles. But we couldn't reach the Ardıl family. Probably because they know that we are investigating, they closed the “contact us” section of the site. All other methods we used for reaching them also failed.
First who pointed out this issue is A. Murat Eren from NTV Science Magazine. Eren, who is also a academic,  gives interesting information about site's scope: “It is a widely known fact that there is a disproportion between publication and citation counts in Turkey, also how academics gets on staff by which kind of publications in provincial universities (small, country universities). This site allows people to publish by money, in fact who couldn't publish their works in another way (channel, course). Academics, who collects a few hundred euros, easily publish in WASET, without bothering himself/herself with complicated scientific process. Who pludges the money, climbs the stairs of academic life two by two. If published thousands articles, organized tens of conferences are thought, it can be seen that it is a really profitable business. When everybody wins, unfortunately science is losing.”
Again from the Eren's article, we learn that many of those who applied to the WASET originate from countries such as Bulgaria, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Georgia, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, or Indonesia. Some of the academics who are working on Turkey's universities are also regulars on the WASET. Common characteristics of these countries are that their hardship (poverty, etc.) in contribution to science, scientific thought and science world! “For instance” says A. Murat Eren, “a academic who published 14 article in WASET's so-called journals in Mathematics still serves in Uludag University”. We found the academic Prof. Ahmet Tekcan, who Eren mentions. He said to us, as soon as he learned that WASET was doing such things, he disengaged (dropped all relations) from it: “I have 14 articles since 2007 in WASET group journals and most of them are joint studies which are done with associates from my department. After hearing the news about WASET, I stopped sending articles to it. In the end nobody wants to be tainted (stained) by his scientific works. As I see most of the people who has papers with this group are not aware of the news about it.”
When we ask about the difficulty of publishing 14 articles in the field such as Mathematics in one year, he said that it is possible with well-founded basis (foundation). However, we couldn't find anyone within the most reputed mathematicians who can publish 14 articles in one year.
ENFORMATIKA PHASE
WASET actually is a new site. Before it, there was a site with Enformatika name. But, academic member of İTÜ Prof. Tayfun Akgül, who writes under the nickname “Conik Author: Piref H. Ökkeş” in Matematik Dünyası (Mathematical World Magazine), wrote an article in the magazine titled “I've sent a paper to bogus conference”. Piref Ökkeş, heard about an international conference in his major is going to be organized in Istanbul, also leading scientists from the world are going to attend to this conference. After sending an email to the one of the renowned scientists in list, he learned that this person don't have any information about the conference. Thus, it is emerged that this conference is totally fake.
But Piref Ökkeş, didn't settle with this. After a while, he sent an article with totally a fabricated title and content to the site. After an article was accepted and declared to be a fake article, the site was deciphered and it was hurriedly closed. Actually it only changed its logo. The new logo, which can easily be guessed, is WASET. “After this news” says A. Murat Eren, “probably WASET logo will change too”. 
When we were researching about this issue, we repeatedly called YÖK (The Council of Higher Education in Turkey) president Prof. Yusuf Ziya Özcan and sent our questions to his answering machine, but we couldn't get any answer from him.
TÜBA can't keep track of everything
TÜBA PRESIDENT PROF. YÜCEL KANPOLAT
I didn't know anything about WASET internet site. After your notice I researched. But I have to confess tha, I don't intend on keeping track of that thing. Also it is out of the question for TÜBA (Turkey Sciences Academy). People who takes this kind of actions, shouldn't have any claims about science. Society is also not criticizing (blame, condemn, denounce) this kind of people. I am sorry I don't have time to look into the question 'Is there any relation to publication explosion?'”.
TEN PERSONS WITH THE MOST PUBLISHED ARTICLES IN WASET
Cemal Ardıl (46)
Ahmet Tekcan (14)
Melih Turgut (14)
Atilla Akpınar (12)
Basri Çelik (12)
Osman Bizim (10)
Serkan Narlı (8)
Betül Gezer (8)
Ali Eryılmaz (7)
Emin Özyılmaz (6)
 _____
 
Hi,
A friend of mine who reads your blog sent me this link. Thanks for the translation. I am the person who did the research and wrote the original article about WASET, which led to this publication. I just wanted to let anyone who is interested that the original article here can be found here:
http://meren.org/blog/bilimsel-ahlaksizligin-gri-mecralari/

Following short article is a summary of the former one which was published in NTV Science and was referenced from Hürriyet:
http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25165267/
 
A little note: the person who published 14 math articles in one year was defended by his Dean in Turkey after this news, and I was accused of slandering his colleagues and their department in Uludag University, because I was a servant of 'some people' who were 'jealous' of their success and had 'ulterior motives'. Ironically, when I searched his name in my WASET archives it turned out that this Dean himself had publications under WASET, as well.

It is not only Uludag University. I have unbelievable examples from all over the country. These people occupy 'departments' all together. They very well know what they are doing, and they protect their territory by hiring only people who share the same perspective on ethics and science.

This type of frauds are simply choking the academia in Turkey. While inflating the number of publications that are coming out of Turkey each year increases, the actual contribution of Turkey to international science is essentially zero, except a couple of lucky/heroic/isolated efforts. Quantitative measures to assess the importance of a scientist are open to abuse. Lack of regulations and ethics make under-developed countries like Turkey extremely good at abusing those indices, and therefore they remain under-developed.
Best,

June 16, 2012

Mock Conferences - Copy, Shake, and Paste

After being forced to remove pages from my blog dealing with what I called a "fake conference" and naming a name, the lawyer who tried (unsuccessfully) to discredit me at my university wrote a "thank you" note to the university stating what a fine person I am and then tried to get me to give her some specific information. I said "No", and remembered that I wanted to revisit the topic of fake conferences. But since the name "fake" seems to be hotly contested because the conferences do tend to take place, I am now using the term "mock conference", in addition to "junk journals" and "pretend publishers" for things I want to be writing about in the near future.

What is a mock conference? Here's the discussion from one of the pages I had to remove, minus the reference to a particular conference and enhanced by points from the discussion that ensued.

I feel that a mock conference is one that has some (or all) of the following properties:

  1. Has an extremely wide call for papers.
  2. Is co-located with many other conferences that are all in the same manner, but with another field, or is located in the same place a similar conference happened a few days before (see my table about the suspicious Chinese conferences from 2009).
  3. Is located in a place people would want to visit as a tourist (Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong, etc.) or even at a tourist hotel.
  4. The same person organizes multiple international conferences in one year (one national conference is enough to tire anyone).
  5. The sponsors are dodgy - for example, IEEE seems to sponsor anything that pays for the use of the logo. IEEE has, however, begun to crack down on mock conferences and has decided not to publish the proceedings from quite a number of conferences in 2010 and 2011.
  6. Or the "sponsors" are just the department that specific professors are associated with, but the advertising is done with the university logo. Sometimes logos are just used without the institution involved knowing about its so-called sponsorship.
  7. Even though they may brag about the number of citations they have (and in my book, if you have to announce that people have cited papers from the conference, then it is not an important conference), one needs to factor out the self-citations. These are when the author of a paper at the conference is citing own work submitted to a previous version of the conference.
  8. Makes sure you pay your fee before the paper is published. Although it seems that there have been to many authors not showing up at conferences after getting a paper accepted, which rather defeats the purpose of a conference. Having paid the conference fee is supposed to increase the chance of actually presenting the paper.
  9. Offers a special deal if you "take" two papers.
  10. Accepts papers just days before the conference as long as you pay the fee.
  11. Accepts papers only on the basis of an abstract.
  12. Often chooses a publisher that sounds very similar to a renowned publisher, or publishes at a print-on-demand house. Some even just publish online (but with ISBN number) to save trees.
  13. Accepts papers without sending out reviews. Many of these conferences insist that they "do" peer review, but there are often no substantial comments made about the individual papers. Or the reviews only come back when explicitly requested.
  14. Has many, many parallel sessions that are only sparsely attended, usually because they are on such vastly different topics.
  15. The program committee of the conference is unreasonably large, e.g., more than 100 members.
  16. The number of accepted papers is in the 100s.
  17. Anything else?
Panos Ipeirotis had also noted: "The way that you separate the legitimate from the fraudulent event is through the community. Unfortunately, if there are academics that form a mutual admiration clique and decide to meet once a year, exchanging citations, it is very difficult to separate an event like that from other legitimate fields that are rather insular and do not communicate much with other fields."

I hope we can continue discussing the properties of mock conferences, without resorting to names.

Updates: Split 1. into 1. and 2. Maybe I need to start sorting the properties into categories?

"Die Wissenschaft" and plagiarism - Copy, Shake and Paste

There's a bit of an absurd discussion running in Germany at the moment. The Süddeutsche Zeitung published a guest editorial by eight formerly important men in the German universities and scientific bodies. They make this clear by stating at the beginning of the editorial how important they were. They represent "Die Wissenschaft", science and scholarship. Except for one, I believe they are all now retired.

As Anatol Stefanowitch makes clear, he was expecting them to state some clear demands, such as that plagiarists should not hold public office, or perhaps even a word of thanks for the GuttenPlag Wiki and VroniPlag Wiki collaborative plagiarism documentations. Or maybe even a brief reflection on the sins of the system "university" in Germany.

But no, none of the above. They waffle around, trying to redefine what plagiarism is. They beat around the bush. Are they really writing about the *Plag Wikis, or is this about the demands that a politician accused of plagiarism step down? The press has so readily printed these demands from someone thrown out of one of the groups over 7 months ago for, among other things, unscientific behavior. Or are they writing about flying teapots? They don't even make it clear who exactly they are writing about. They prefer to not go into detail, to clearly state their business, but they hide behind statements that are open to interpretation.

Then the editorial writers make it clear that they do not understand at all what the discussion is about. The Internet has not set down some "new" methods for documenting sources in scientific discourse. It has always been clear (or it should have always been clear) that one must delineate the beginning and the end of what one uses from others, and give a clear and useful reference to the source. That's all. The Internet does, however, make it much easier to find and document the sins of the past.

The *Plag Wikis have not been discussing the content of the dissertations, no matter how often they have been sorely tempted to lose some words about the sordid state of many of them. They have just been documenting plagiarism, for everyone to see. The University of Heidelberg, again an "excellent" university in Germany, states that 70 % plagiarism is fine and dandy in medicine. That's the way they do science in medicine. The BTU Cottbus thinks that 40 % is okay, as long as the doctoral student donates lots of money by way of his company to the university. Or so one must assume, as the expertises investigating the cases have not and presumably will not be published. Everything is highly secret, you see.

Science must be open, for all to see and discuss. Science, as Robert K. Merton stated (and I know that I am starting to sound like a broken record on this), is universal, communal, personally disinterested, and exercises organized skepticism in order to produce new knowledge. Hiding the reasoned discussion of why these blatant plagiarisms that even a primary school child can see are considered perfectly okay, is spineless.

The problem of plagiarism and scientific misconduct is endemic. It can be found in all levels at the university. And it won't go away by pretending that it does not exist or that the people pointing their fingers are somehow not qualified. And it won't go away because of pointless editorials. The universities must wake up and take charge of the situation. Plagiarism must not be tolerated on any level. And the universities would be well advised to move to transparent communication and a timely resolution of accusations.

June 6, 2012

Massive Data Fraud in Chemistry - Copy, Shake, and Paste

I have been sent a link on the Bengü Sezen case at Columbia University. Sezen is a chemist who was accused of massive data fraud, her case was under investigation by the Office of Research Integrity, a national organization dealing with scientific misconduct in the USA. At least 6 papers in which she was involved have had to be retracted, and Columbia University is moving to revoke her Ph.D. Interestingly, Chemical & Engineering News reports:
After leaving Columbia, Sezen went on to receive another Ph.D. in molecular biology at Germany’s Heidelberg University.
I have, however, been unable to locate any reference in the German National Library of a dissertation accepted at Heidelberg by someone of this name, and all doctorates granted in Germany must be listed here. The blog linked to above has collected many interesting links on the topic.

June 1, 2012

List of Publishers : Beall’s List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers (Scholarly Open Access)

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. I recommend that scholars not do any business with these publishers, including submitting articles, serving as editors or on editorial boards, or advertising with them. Also, articles published in these publishers’ journals should be given extra scrutiny in the process of evaluation for tenure and promotion.
Last updated June 1, 2012

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