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.
June 21, 2012
A (Partial) Defense of Jonah Lehrer - The Atlantic
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.
June 20, 2012
PM’s plagiarism scandal puts spotlight on culture of academic cheating in Romania - The Washington Post
Romania: Plagiarism Scandal Ensnares Prime Minister - The New York Times
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
June 19, 2012
Romanian prime minister accused of plagiarism - The Guardian
Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself? - Slate
June 17, 2012
Turkish mock conferences - Copy, Shake, and Paste
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)
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/
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
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:
- Has an extremely wide call for papers.
- 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).
- 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.
- The same person organizes multiple international conferences in one year (one national conference is enough to tire anyone).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Offers a special deal if you "take" two papers.
- Accepts papers just days before the conference as long as you pay the fee.
- Accepts papers only on the basis of an abstract.
- 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.
- 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.
- Has many, many parallel sessions that are only sparsely attended, usually because they are on such vastly different topics.
- The program committee of the conference is unreasonably large, e.g., more than 100 members.
- The number of accepted papers is in the 100s.
- Anything else?
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
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
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)
- A M Publishers
- Academe Research Journals
- Academic and Business Research Institute
- Academic Journals
- Academic Journals, Inc.
- Academic Research Publishing Agency
- Academy Journals
- Academy Publish
- ANSINetwork
- Ashdin Publishing
- Asian Research Consortium
- Bentham Open
- BioInfo
- Bioscience Research & Educational Institute
- Canadian Center of Science and Education
- Center for the Development and Dissemination of Knowledge
- Center for Promoting Ideas
- The Clute Institute
- Computer Science Journals
- e-Century Publishing Corporation
- eLearning Institute
- Discovery Publishing Group
- David Publishing
- Elmer Press
- EuroJournals
- Global Advanced Research Journals
- Global Journals, Inc. (US)
- Global Science and Technology Forum
- GlobalOpenJournals.org
- Greener Journals
- Herald International Researh Journals
- Herbert Open Access Journals
- Human Resource Management Academic Research Society
- iConcept Press
- Indian Society for Education and Environment
- Insight Knowledge
- Institute of Advanced Scientific Research
- InTech Open Access Publisher - Mirror site
- International Academy of Business & Economics
- International Digital Organization for Scientific Information
- International Journals of Engineering & Sciences
- International Journals of Multidisciplinary Research Academy
- International Research Journals
- International Scholars Journals [Link dead since May 2012]
- Internet Scientific Publications
- Interscience Journals
- Interscience Open Access Journals
- ISRN
- Jyoti Academic Press
- Knowledgia Scientific (formerly Knowledgia Review)
- Macrothink Institute
- Marsland Press
- Medical Science Journals
- Medwell Journals
- Mehta Press
- Noto-are
- OMICS Publishing Group
- Online Research Journals
- OpenAccessPub
- Open Research Society
- Prime Journals
- Research Publisher
- Scholarly Journals International
- Sciedu Press
- Science & Knowledge Publishing Corporation Limited
- Science Alert
- Science Journal Publication
- Science Publications
- ScienceDomain International
- ScienceHuβ
- Scientific & Academic Publishing
- Scientific Journals International
- Scientific Research Publishing
- SciTechnol
- Segment Journals
- Southern Cross Publishing Group
- Thavan E ACT International Journals
- Universal Research Journals
- The World Academic Publishing
- World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
- World Science Publisher
- World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society
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