Re: Detecting Plagiarism
Dear Sally,
as this and other comments show, there is an enormous difference
between the practical level of operation
of the conventional system and what it might be able to do at its best.
Unfortunately, I suspect the same will be true of the replacement or
supplementary system(s).
The technical means suggested by Eberhardt, and similar, would work in
either, but he gives an admittedly straightforward example; I suspect that
human ingenuity and the pressure to publish will will continue to hamper
measures towards a more efficient literature.
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote:
dear Sally,
I have on my desk papers, published in highly esteemed physics journals,
which are 80% Latex-identical, and still this has passed the referees
and the publishers.
(In a few cases it is even the same publisher and journal, could have
been the same referee even!!).
Thus a plagiarism test is definitely not done,even by the most
distinguished editors, referees, journals, publishers even in their own
house.
However: plagiarism is more subtle as that it could be seriously tackled
by text string overlapping.
1. text string copying is very seldom in physics at least.
2. most common is 'assimilation of the new findings and methods of others'
and not citing them (too seldom revealed by referees),
3. uttermost common, the (almost) common case is 'self-plagiarism',
that is, the author copies and pastes text strings of earlier papers into
the new file.
In the case, I have in front of me, it is this case: the author group
uses the file of an earlier accepted paper and pastes it to be the new
one, then cutting the last chapter ('new results'), replaces it by really
new never published outrageous new and important sophisticated new
results, keeps the earlier dull chapters as asked for by the publisher
such as Intrdouction, Used Method, Work of Others, Their shortcomings,
tools and expertise of the group, etc.
yes, and finally adapts the wording of the title and abstract.
So if I were to claim to have checked for plagiarism, I would have
detected this case.
So, if I were a referee I would have accepted it for its new findings
but would have asked the authors to shorten the paper by let them refer
to the earlier ones or use the Paranthesis 'from here on to there we just
cite the earlier paper.
How to cope with it:
Thus it is better, to publish a paper first, by either selfarchiving or
using the ArXiv, and let the community then all look at the findings.
After some comments authors will vote for 'living documents', where the
(above mentioned well written ) part form an original part of the new
paper, as a multi-file document with different timestamps for the
different parts.
Eberhard R. Hilf
.
Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.i.R.;
CEO
Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH
an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet
Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg
http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/
my homepage: http://isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf
h...@isn-oldenburg.de
tel/Fax: +49-(0)-441-798-2884/5851
Service PhysNet for the EPS: http://www.physics-network.org
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
Actually, it is pretty difficult for individual authors to pursue
plagiarists, whereas in my experience journal publishers both can and do
(often via their contacts with the publishers of the offending journals). I
don't think publishers' *willingness* to do so has anything at all to do
with copyright ownership; however, their *ability* to act immediately and
decisively, in the courts if absolutely necessary, is strengthened by
copyright ownership, as Martin Blume convincingly pointed out at the last
Zwolle Group conference
Sally
Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-...@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org
Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: Detecting Plagiarism
Just to put plagiarism in perspective: Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research. - Wilson Mizner (1876-1933) Jan
Re: Detecting Plagiarism
Martin Blume wrote: We would of course have pursued this on behalf of the authors of the plagiarized article if they had retained copyright. But this wouldn't work if the paper were in the public domain. I can point to three different papers in the past six months where we used copyright as a prod in dealing with other journals. I think you are mistaking the concept of `public domain'. The fact that a paper is pre-published does not in the legal sense put it into the 'public domain', the author retains copyright, and can transfer rights to the publisher of a revised version, or retain them. It may be that legal threats are the most effective way of getting a plagiarist to respond, and they may seem more plausible coming from a publisher, who can be assumed to have greater resources to resort to law. As has been pointed out, however, such threats rarely are pursued into the courts, Moral pressures on a plagiarist may also be strong, though they need to come from third parties, often the editors of the journal. Such third parties can be placed in very difficult positions however, especially if there is a dispute about the adequacy or need for attribution of sources. But copyright does not help much in such cases. Cheers Sol *** Sol Picciotto Lancaster University Law School Lancaster University Lancaster LA14YN UK direct phone (44)(0)1524-592464 fax (44)(0)1524-525212 email s.piccio...@lancs.ac.uk webpage http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/law/staff/sol.htm ***
Re: Detecting Plagiarism
Sally Are there statistics on how often and through what means scientific journals detect and pursue plagiarism? These would be very useful to help frame these discussions, as would some concrete examples that demonstrate the role that copyright plays in these actions. It seems like you would be in a good position to provide some. Michael - Original Message - From: Sally Morris sec-...@alpsp.org To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 9:25 AM Subject: Re: Learned Society Publisher's Comment on PLoS/Sabo Actually, it is pretty difficult for individual authors to pursue plagiarists, whereas in my experience journal publishers both can and do (often via their contacts with the publishers of the offending journals). I don't think publishers' *willingness* to do so has anything at all to do with copyright ownership; however, their *ability* to act immediately and decisively, in the courts if absolutely necessary, is strengthened by copyright ownership, as Martin Blume convincingly pointed out at the last Zwolle Group conference Sally Sally Morris, Secretary-General Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-...@alpsp.org ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org - Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2003 1:00 AM Subject: Re: Learned Society Publisher's Comment on PLoS/Sabo On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Patrick Brown wrote: On Saturday, July 19, 2003, at 08:07 AM, Stevan Harnad wrote: sh The Sabo act is indeed a bit flaky on copyright. Copyright protection sh against plagiarism (theft-of-authorship) and text-corruption will of sh course have to be maintained. But this has nothing whatsoever to do sh with toll-access publishers' use of copyright as protection against sh piracy (theft-of-text). Copyright protection has never been used as a defense against plagiarism of scientific and scholarly work published in research journals. Never is probably overstating it, but I am sure that journals have rarely gone after plagiarists, partly because research plagiarism is rare, and partly because, as I noted, their main interest is in copyright protection against theft-of-text, not theft-of-authorship. But I do think that research authors need and want protection from theft-of-authorship, as well as from text-corruption (reproduction of altered text). http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/ The disincentive to those who would be tempted to plagiarize is not the law but very effective and clear community standards of behavior. But the fact that it also happens to be illegal helps. (And the way to win researchers over to the benefits of open access is not by awakening their fears of plagiarism.) Exposure of an act of plagiarism ruins the perpetrator's reputations and almost inevitably costs them their grant support and their jobs. I agree. And I would even add that it is mostly a victimless crime. (Important research's priority is immediately and widely known; unimportant research is less worth worrying about. I am not the victim if you take my papers and publish them as your own in some obscure journal in order to get tenure or funding at some uninformed institution. At worst, the victim is the duped institution, not me.) But authors nevertheless don't like the prospect of plagiarism, and there is no reason *whatsoever* to couple open-access with any lesser legal protection against plagiarism than that afforded by copyright law. The classic academic plagiarism involves stealing work from an obscure publication, and often publishing it in an equally obscure publication, so that the risk of detection is minimized. There could be no better protection than to have immediate, easy free online access to an authoritative copy of the original work, from a trusted source. I agree 100%. Open access maximizes the likelihood of detection. But now, when we are still trying to allay the research community's prima facie hesitancy about open access, a time when open access is already long overdue, but definitiely not yet upon us -- this is *not* the time to reinforce their worries that open access might come at the cost of a loss of legal protection against plagiarism and corruption of their texts! Copyright, to the extent that it is used to restrict access (and for most online academic journals, proscribe independent users from automatic searching and indexing of the text), protects plagiarizers from being detected. Copyright, when it is used for (publisher) protection against theft-of-text, does the refereed-research community
Re: Detecting Plagiarism
dear Sally,
I have on my desk papers, published in highly esteemed physics journals,
which are 80% Latex-identical, and still this has passed the referees
and the publishers.
(In a few cases it is even the same publisher and journal, could have
been the same referee even!!).
Thus a plagiarism test is definitely not done,even by the most
distinguished editors, referees, journals, publishers even in their own
house.
However: plagiarism is more subtle as that it could be seriously tackled
by text string overlapping.
1. text string copying is very seldom in physics at least.
2. most common is 'assimilation of the new findings and methods of others'
and not citing them (too seldom revealed by referees),
3. uttermost common, the (almost) common case is 'self-plagiarism',
that is, the author copies and pastes text strings of earlier papers into
the new file.
In the case, I have in front of me, it is this case: the author group
uses the file of an earlier accepted paper and pastes it to be the new
one, then cutting the last chapter ('new results'), replaces it by really
new never published outrageous new and important sophisticated new
results, keeps the earlier dull chapters as asked for by the publisher
such as Intrdouction, Used Method, Work of Others, Their shortcomings,
tools and expertise of the group, etc.
yes, and finally adapts the wording of the title and abstract.
So if I were to claim to have checked for plagiarism, I would have
detected this case.
So, if I were a referee I would have accepted it for its new findings
but would have asked the authors to shorten the paper by let them refer
to the earlier ones or use the Paranthesis 'from here on to there we just
cite the earlier paper.
How to cope with it:
Thus it is better, to publish a paper first, by either selfarchiving or
using the ArXiv, and let the community then all look at the findings.
After some comments authors will vote for 'living documents', where the
(above mentioned well written ) part form an original part of the new
paper, as a multi-file document with different timestamps for the
different parts.
Eberhard R. Hilf
.
Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.i.R.;
CEO
Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH
an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet
Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg
http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/
my homepage: http://isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf
h...@isn-oldenburg.de
tel/Fax: +49-(0)-441-798-2884/5851
Service PhysNet for the EPS: http://www.physics-network.org
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Sally Morris wrote:
Actually, it is pretty difficult for individual authors to pursue
plagiarists, whereas in my experience journal publishers both can and do
(often via their contacts with the publishers of the offending journals). I
don't think publishers' *willingness* to do so has anything at all to do
with copyright ownership; however, their *ability* to act immediately and
decisively, in the courts if absolutely necessary, is strengthened by
copyright ownership, as Martin Blume convincingly pointed out at the last
Zwolle Group conference
Sally
Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-...@alpsp.org
ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org
Re: Detecting Plagiarism
At 09:58 AM 7/23/2003 -0700, Michael Eisen asked: Are there statistics on how often and through what means scientific journals detect and pursue plagiarism? These would be very useful to help frame these discussions, as would some concrete examples that demonstrate the role that copyright plays in these actions. It seems like you would be in a good position to provide some. I would like to reply on behalf of a single publisher - the American Physical Society - to the questions concerning copyright and plagiarism. I have stated in the past that we would pursue plagiarists whether or not we had copyright, and that copyright would not play a role in our actions. I have had, as a result of recent experiences, to change my mind on this. We have had a rash of cases brought to our attention where papers in our journals (the Physical Review journals and Reviews of Modern Physics) have been plagiarized in others (and in one case where we published an article that was plagiarized from another journal). The heightened awareness of cases of scientific misconduct has probably led to an increased reporting of such problems. The most difficult thing we had to deal with was getting other journals to face up to the problem and to publish a retraction of the plagiarized article. It was here that we were able to pressure the editors of the other journal with the fact that they were violating our copyright. This quickly got their attention, and retractions were soon forthcoming. We would of course have pursued this on behalf of the authors of the plagiarized article if they had retained copyright. But this wouldn't work if the paper were in the public domain.I can point to three different papers in the past six months where we used copyright as a prod in dealing with other journals. Martin Blume Editor-in-Chief The American Physical Society One Research Road Ridge, NY 11961-9000 USA e-mail: bl...@aps.org phone: 631 591 4036 fax: 631 591 4275
