Plagiarism has been legalized !

Translated from Gazete soL 

State Council Committee for Administrative Cases in Turkey has ruled that banishment of faculty members who has been involved in plagiarism cases is not based on legislation, in other words, they have legalized plagiarism. 

Especially in the last few years, there has been a rise in plagiarism cases in Turkish Universities. State Council’s verdict, on the other hand, will encourage those who are involved in plagiarism. State Council Committee for Administrative Cases has decided that banishment of faculty members from their universities is unjust. 

Higher Educational Council (YÖK) of Turkey did not waste any time to put the decree in action by issuing a directive to obey the State Council’s decision.
According to the 3rd  paragraph of 11th article in Faculty Members Discipline Bylaw of YÖK’s Legislature, “using other’s work or study as one’s own without any reference” is a basis for banishment of the faculty member from the university or civil service, however, according to a State Council Decision issued in 2012, this deed has been dropped from being a crime.

There is no Legal basis
The 15 month old decision of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases has rendered the crime of plagiarism sanctionless. Council’s Decision, dating September 2012, states that “there are no regulations for punishment of faculty member, which is established by Faculty Member Discipline Bylaw as banishment, in the YÖK Legislature no. 2547 and State Officer Legislature no. 657” the penalty has no legal basis. As a result, Council has ruled that the disgraceful act of plagiarism /scientific rip off is not a crime.

YÖK: Do not punish
Faculty Members Discipline Bylaw was issued according to the YÖK Legislature no. 547, thus, after the decision of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases regarding the legality of the punishment, YÖK did not attempt to remove the legal void by National Education Ministry and Grand Turkish Assembly; furthermore, it has issued an invoice to rectorates. YÖK’s notice petitioned “to act according to the civil jurisdiction in cases initiated for plagiarism charges”. This official notice directly means to do nothing against faculty members that commit plagiarism.

YÖK’s notice has been imparted to corresponding units in 19 November 2013 by Yunus Söylet, Rector of İstanbul University.

Old penalties rendered void 
On the other hand, according to the Council’s rule, bygone penalties given to the faculty members regarding the plagiarism has “rendered void due to legality”. This opened up the channel for all faculty members who have been banished for committing plagiarism to return to their old posts and demand all of the salaries and monetary entitlements.

‘This will encourage plagiarism’
Prof. Dr. Kayhan Kantarlı, a retired faculty member of Ege University of İzmir, Turkey, stated that Council’s rule will encourage those who intend to do plagiarism. Kantarlı invited all authorities to act against the President of Higher Education Council who breached his duty by letting this scandalous thing to happen which will pave the way for collapse of ethical perception. Kantarlı also called attention of legislative bodies to close this legal void immediately.

‘There is no corresponding crime or act’
Lawsuit was filed by Kamil Can Bulut who was a faculty member at Department of Literature in Ege University, was found to plagiarize in one of his books. In the decree of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases it has been stated that “there is also no corresponding penalty that requires banishment of the faculty member of the university in Legislature no. 2547. In this case, since there are no legal decrees that require the penalty of banishment and there is no legal basis for the act that require this penalty, there is no illegality according to the regulations that is the case before the court and the act that is based on this regulation.” Decision has passed with unanimity of 15 members of the Council except Halide Ayfer Özdemir, including the vice chairman.         

Peer Review, Impact Factors, and the Decline of Science -Copy Shake and Paste

Debora Weber-Wulff

The Economist reported on October 19, 2013 (pp. 21-24) that there is "Trouble at the lab". Indeed. And trouble has been brewing for quite some time without a single identifiable culprit or an easy way to solve the problem. This problem is concerned with predatory publishing, irreproducibility of scientific results, and the use of quantitative data as an attempt to judge quality.

University administrations, search and tenure committees, governments, funding associations, and other bodies need some way of judging people they don't know in order to decide whether to offer them jobs or promotions or funding. This has often boiled down to counting the number of publications, or the impact factors of the journals in which their articles are published. Coupled with the crisis in publishing, with the subscription price of subscription journals exploding, an unhealthy mix is brewing.

Predatory publishers promise quick publication in good-sounding "international" journals, using the Open Access "golden road" to extract fees from authors. They promise peer review, but if at all they only seem to look at the formatting. Established publishers trying to keep up their profits have incorporated more and more journals into their portfolios without keeping a watchful eye on quality control.

Enter John Bohannon. In October 2013 Bohannon published an article in Science, Who's Afraid of Peer Review? He details a sting operation that he conducted between January and August 2013, submitting 304 papers with extremely obvious deficiencies to journals that he chose both from Lund University's "Directory of Open Access Journals" as well as from Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers.

Bohannon has put his data online, showing that 82% of the journals chosen from Beale's list accepted the fabricated paper, as well as 45% of the journals on the DOAJ list. Predictably, DOAJ is not amused and accusing Bohannon of, among other things, racism because he chose African-sounding names for the authors (1 - 2).

In August 2013, Nature journalist Richard van Noorden detailed a scheme by publishers called "citation stacking" in which a group of publishers collude to quote extensively from each other's journals in order to avoid being sanctioned for coercive citation. This activity was described in Science in 2012 by Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong as a process by which authors are instructed to quote from a publisher's own journals in order to increase the so-called impact factor. van Noorden's article focused on a group of Brazilian journals, so he, too, was accused of racism. This is unfortunate, as it detracts from a very serious problem.

We find ourselves today in a rapidly expanding world with scientific research being conducted in many different places and much money being invested in producing results. People need publications, and have little time for doing peer review, a job that is generally not paid for and performed as a service to the community. Universities in countries without a tradition of rigorous scientific practice have researchers who need publications, and there are people out to make money any way they can. Researchers competing for scarce jobs in countries that are trying to spend less on science and education than they have in the past are also sometimes tempted to follow the path of less resistance and publish with such journals. And some are not aware that they have just selected a publication that sounds like one that is well respected, as Beall has noted.

I don't have a solution to offer, other than boycotting the use of quantitative data about publications and getting people to be aware of the scams going on. We need to get serious about peer review, embracing such concepts as open access pre- and post-publication peer review in order to get more rigor into the publication process. I realize that people have been complaining about the decline of science since at least Charles Babbage (Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, And on Some of Its Causes, 1830). But we are in grave danger of letting bad science get the upper hand.

And what happens to those who try and point out some of the dicier parts of science? Nature just published another article by van Noorden, together with Ed Yong and Heidi Ledford, Research ethics:  3 ways to blow the whistle.

Musings on mock conferences and predatory journals - Copy Shake and Paste

Jeffrey Beall published the "evaluation form" from a scientist who was lured to one of the many OMICS mock conferences. He describes pretty much all of the behavior that is found at such conferences: no involvement of the people on the committees, shortening the conference, massive no-shows, lots of pictures and awards and a fancy web site. It took a lot of effort on his part to get his name removed from their web site, the entire page has now been pulled. Perhaps scientists should quit attending large conferences at hotels, instead sticking to smaller, focused conferences held at universities?

OMICS also publish a wide range of "open access" journals that are on the predatory publishing list. I wonder how many of the "editors-in-chief" actually know that they are editors here?

One of the commenters noted that there is now a CWTS Journal indicator that calculates an impact factor that is normalized according to the field for journals in the SCOPUS database. I looked up a few journals, they seem to have only English-language journals listed. Even just looking at my field, I see so very many journals, how on earth are people able to read all of them? It might be good to check out the journals you are planning on submitting to before you dash off that manuscript.