7 ms·

Sometimes the collusion is blatantly obvious. Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a p

Sometimes the collusion is blatantly obvious. Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. My colleage switched research directions to avoid the collusion and now takes pains not to submit papers without a coauthor who has enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft. He also avoids dealing with editors from institutions in China. He ended up graduating two years later than planned.

JoeyBananas 5y ago
that's a good reason to put it papers on arxiv before you submit them
Eridrus 5y ago
The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  This is becoming more popular in another field (non-CS) I follow, but for different reasons: Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server. This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
  - josephg 5y ago
    > I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases. This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think this makes sense anyway. Peer review & editing from journals made a lot more sense in the world where physically publishing, printing & distributing papers made out of atoms was expensive and difficult. And where retractions and corrections were near impossible, and where we didn't have systems for tracking reputation. More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community. It won't be perfect, but neither is the current system. And speaking as a mostly independent researcher, the idea of signing over copyright of my work for the privilege of putting my work on their website is preposterous. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the kind of corruption described here.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community. That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. I think one of the basic functions of peer review is to provide a basic authoritative quality filter to help make the fire-hose manageable. As someone who lacks the infinite time needed to check everything myself, I find those kinds of filters valuable.
      - barry-cotter 5y ago
        > That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Is it possible to upload to arXiv but have it as private, but have the upload date reserved. Then if something like this happens, you can turn it to public and show that yours was uploaded first. Obviously arXiv itself would need to be a trusted middleman and guarantee that the system isn't being cheated.
  - pithon 5y ago
    Or upload an encrypted version of the file or just a hash of the figure ahead of time? Then release the descrypt key later or when the figure is published, you can point to the hash which was uploaded publicly a long time ago?
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      This would be the ultimate proof, but it would also require the system of justice to care enough to accept the proof. It sounds like they just don't care.
      - wait_a_minute 5y ago
        So make them care - tell your representatives, vote, etc. let’s make noise about it and it will happen.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - ehsankia 5y ago
        I don't think the system of justice would ever go after that random Chinese scientist, but it may be able to take down the fake arXiv entry, as well as help confirm to journals than your idea came first.
    - sebmellen 5y ago
- pavon 5y ago
  The journal already had documented evidence that the legitimate paper was submitted to the journal before the plagerism was submitted to ArXiv. I don't know why they would trust an ArXiv timestamp more than their own.
  - Eridrus 5y ago
    The ArXiv timestamp/paper is public, so even if the conference doesn't do the right thing, you should still be able to submit it elsewhere.
SignalNotSecure 5y ago
Stated another way Chinese university journal editors stole a little over two percent of his life
- btmorex 5y ago
  That's nothing. Chinese virology researchers just stole a year from pretty much everyone's life.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Any evidence that it came from the lab?
    - ggggtez 5y ago
      It seems recently they uncovered evidence that patient 0 never visited any wet markets. Among some other head scratchers. Fauci says it's a coin flip, 50/50 odds it came from a lab. More research is necessary, but it's worth keeping your mind open to new evidence.
    - btmorex 5y ago
      https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/wuhan-lab-covid-origin-theory/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/wuhan-lab-covid-orig... US intelligence reports that researchers from the virology lab in Wuhan were hospitalized with an unknown illness in November of 2019, most notably before the "patient #0" was infected.
    - msie 5y ago
      Some say it couldn’t have been designed: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html#xenforo-comments-1568 https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-la...
      - garmaine 5y ago
        That wasn’t the question.
jollybean 5y ago
But these things can affect real credibility if not superficial credibility. I wonder if it's worth staring a web-site where friendly scientists put papers side by side and say 'Was this a Rip Off'? Whereby at least the scammers get some form of possible public shaming for as long as the paper exists. I can just imagine that site coming up in web searches ... how could people not click it?
- geraneum 5y ago
  I wonder if there's already a tool that clusters papers by similarity or else how do the reviewers reject a paper on such ground. How do they find it? Do they know them all by heart? Maybe we (the community) can help by creating an open platform that scraps openly available papers and automatically finds and sorts similar ones.
  - neutered_knot 5y ago
    I’m an academic computer scientist. I submit things I review through my institutions cheating detection system. I have found plagiarized submissions this way.
    - geraneum 5y ago
      I was not aware of it, thanks for the info. I followed up on the topic and found the famous ones.
ggggtez 5y ago
While I've never had an experience that bad, I've certainly peer reviewed utter garbage from one Chinese professor, who was publishing something like 200 papers a year. I don't care how many graduate students you have, there is no way all of that is original research. And in my case, it was an obfuscated version of a very well known theory that any freshman would know.
msie 5y ago
So your colleague submitted their paper before the other paper was posted to arXiv and yet it was still rejected? Crazy!
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  Yup. That was my reaction at first, too. Definitely taught me a lot about informal trust systems in academia.
SneakyTornado29 5y ago
Preprint servers for the win!
Retric 5y ago
The only appropriate response to that is to go scorched earth and try and get not just those to published the copied paper but the reviewer who linked it fired. And then make it very clear what the journal let happen to others in the field. Also, a DMCA request to arXiv would likely work.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  It’s unclear that stealing someone’s scientific ideas is a copyright violation. Though it may depend on exactly what was copied and how. > In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    The ideas themselves aren't but it appears the paper was a blatant copy, image by image, and this IS a copyright violation.
    - lodovic 5y ago
      "regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work" - didn't know this either, but apparently even image-by-image copies are allowed.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Scientific ideas are one thing, however if scientific papers don’t have copyright protection then Sci-Hub should be legally fine. So, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
JetAlone 5y ago
Reading about that makes me very angry. I long to see some justice for your colleague. Lots of good suggestions to guard with arXiv, I hope many young academics coming through read this post and learn from it. I wish I had something more substantive to add, but, all I can say is I hope your colleague knows that even if the swindlers and plagiarizers take our research, years of our lives, etc, be they in China or wherever the whole wide world else ain't able to take away the heart of a real one. They know the research ain't theirs, and they know they depend on real producers to be able to commit their crimes, or do anything actually useful and it's not the other way around. These plagiarists are parasites, and one day we'll be free of them.
- zomglings 5y ago
  Sadly, I cannot share your optimism. As long as metrics like impact factor and citation count determine the trajectories of academic careers, plagiarism, collusion, and other forms of academic dishonesty will not go a way. The fact of the matter is that most academics do not have time to dig into whether someone's work is intellectually dishonest. Being dishonest has a huge payoff as long as you don't cause a scandal. Anyone who plans to stay in academia should understand that the metagame has changed over the last 50 years. Largely because human attention has not scaled with rate at which academics are exposed to and expected to assimilate new information. There is a larger payoff to exploiting the lack of attention than to earnestly carrying out some meaningful research program. At the very least, do both. By no means do only the latter.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    "By no means do not only carry out meaningful research"? Happily, I cannot share your cynicism. There are metrics and citations being taken, of our dishonest acts. They determine the trajectories of virtually everything relevant to our lives, and can have momentous impacts on the lives of others. I cannot judge any other man or woman, but I know I would be a coward, a fool, and a fraud to diversify any kind of portfolio of mine in this life, by consciously choosing to sprinkle in some exploitation or lies.
    - 5y ago
N1H1L 5y ago
That's why you upload to arXiv the da you submit it - to prevent such blatant research theft.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  What happens if people start colluding behind the scenes of arXiv to change their records? Even if the people running it now are totally trustworthy, they won't be in control forever.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Archive.org
  - 8192kjshad09- 5y ago
    Publicly tweet the hash of your PDF, email the hash of your PDF to yourself, upload your PDF to google drive, dropbox, github, and s3. Essentially the whole world would have to collude against you for someone to claim they wrote it before you.
auggierose 5y ago
That story doesn't sound very likely to me. If something like that actually happened, for sure your colleague didn't submit to a "quality" journal.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  It wasn't Nature Materials, but it was one of the top journals for that branch of materials science. I think we were shooting for IF 5 to 10, but I wasn't involved in the work beyond editing the rebuttal.
  - auggierose 5y ago
    IF is a ridiculous measure in the first place. It says nothing about quality. It once was an interesting number from a purely observational point of view, but once journals are actually rated by it, it has no meaning any more.
rdevsrex 5y ago
Why can’t academics insert some sort of cryptographic proof of ownership or publication date? The ownership could be done with something like Keybase, and as far as dates, that could be as simple as private Git repo that you make public or some fancy blockchain solution. But I suppose even then, people could look the other way.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. I have no experience in this area, and I am probably going to ask a dumb question: why not always submit the paper to arXiv before submitting it to a journal to protect against this kind of theft? Wouldn't that clearly and indisputably establish priority?
- atoav 5y ago
  Or use other ways that proof you had the work before anybody has the chance of copying it.
cycomanic 5y ago
Can you give some more details? What field was that in? Can you maybe point to the arxiv paper? What was the journal your colleague submitted to? I'm trying to understand your story because many details are very different from the things I know about scientific publishing. Your colleague was a grad student who researched and conducted an experiment in a new field without a supervisor (you say there wasn't a coauthor with enough research cloud)? This never happens in my field and pretty much any technical field I'm aware of. It then went to the review process and was rejected six month later because a reviewer found (a "copy" of) the paper on arxiv? And the rejection reason was lack of novelty? In many fields arxiv does not count as a "already published" . In particular if the submission date of the article is before the article showing up on arxiv. Also you say the article on arxiv was very obviously copied. So did this result in plagiarism investigations? While there are many things wrong with the current review process, accusations of instances of plagiarism are typically dealt with very quickly and in my experience pretty much always results in the editors in chief getting involved. So did this happen? Also in my experience there is generally much more scepticism against chinese authors than western authors when this happens. The quality of research and publications from China has dramatically increased in the last 5-10 years though.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  The comment you're replying to was quite detailed. Any additional data would identify the paper and therefore the person, transforming OP's comment from an anecdote into a use of HN for griefing purposes. Let's not do that.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    No there is clearly not enough detail to assess the story. Apart from the question if it is justified to name the Arxiv paper (I believe pointing out scientific dishonesty publicly is very important), he could have named the field and journal without revealing anything. I clearly pointed out some gaps in the story that everyone vaguely familiar with scientific publishing would find, that's why I'm asking for clarification.
aba_cz 5y ago
EU has an eIDAS law about qualified signatures and timestamps for years with even an original open-source implementation from EU. You can add it to the PDF and keep it on your machine. It's verifiable by any court in the EU because it's "unbreakable". We use it for every document when communicating with officials and I think more people should do that. You don't need cool blockchains and stuff when you have cryptography.
IceWreck 5y ago
> He ended up graduating two years later than planned. This is so unfair, some cheaters from China got free research papers to their name and the legit author had to waste two years of their life
webmaven 5y ago
> Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. Could you clarify whether the duplicate paper was also submitted to the same journal or elsewhere, and if submitted whether it was accepted? I'm trying to figure out whether the point was to steal credit, or to spike your colleague's submission. > We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. Yeah this is the sort of thing that seems to only ever get resolved if a public stink is made, often on social media these days, because the integrity of both the editor and the journal is being implicated, which ends up with the can of worms[0] being swept under the rug if at all possible. Of course people are going to keep tripping over the bump in the rug, and your colleague might not even have been the first victim. [0] Having to check everything else the editor has ever done for similar misconduct, potentially retractions galore, making victims whole, process improvements, etc.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

that's a good reason to put it papers on arxiv before you submit them

Eridrus 5y ago

The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This is becoming more popular in another field (non-CS) I follow, but for different reasons: Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server. This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
- josephg 5y ago
  > I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases. This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think this makes sense anyway. Peer review & editing from journals made a lot more sense in the world where physically publishing, printing & distributing papers made out of atoms was expensive and difficult. And where retractions and corrections were near impossible, and where we didn't have systems for tracking reputation. More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community. It won't be perfect, but neither is the current system. And speaking as a mostly independent researcher, the idea of signing over copyright of my work for the privilege of putting my work on their website is preposterous. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the kind of corruption described here.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community. That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. I think one of the basic functions of peer review is to provide a basic authoritative quality filter to help make the fire-hose manageable. As someone who lacks the infinite time needed to check everything myself, I find those kinds of filters valuable.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      > That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
ehsankia 5y ago
Is it possible to upload to arXiv but have it as private, but have the upload date reserved. Then if something like this happens, you can turn it to public and show that yours was uploaded first. Obviously arXiv itself would need to be a trusted middleman and guarantee that the system isn't being cheated.
- pithon 5y ago
  Or upload an encrypted version of the file or just a hash of the figure ahead of time? Then release the descrypt key later or when the figure is published, you can point to the hash which was uploaded publicly a long time ago?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    This would be the ultimate proof, but it would also require the system of justice to care enough to accept the proof. It sounds like they just don't care.
    - wait_a_minute 5y ago
      So make them care - tell your representatives, vote, etc. let’s make noise about it and it will happen.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      I don't think the system of justice would ever go after that random Chinese scientist, but it may be able to take down the fake arXiv entry, as well as help confirm to journals than your idea came first.
  - sebmellen 5y ago
pavon 5y ago
The journal already had documented evidence that the legitimate paper was submitted to the journal before the plagerism was submitted to ArXiv. I don't know why they would trust an ArXiv timestamp more than their own.
- Eridrus 5y ago
  The ArXiv timestamp/paper is public, so even if the conference doesn't do the right thing, you should still be able to submit it elsewhere.

SignalNotSecure 5y ago

Stated another way Chinese university journal editors stole a little over two percent of his life

btmorex 5y ago
That's nothing. Chinese virology researchers just stole a year from pretty much everyone's life.
- tolbish 5y ago
  Any evidence that it came from the lab?
  - ggggtez 5y ago
    It seems recently they uncovered evidence that patient 0 never visited any wet markets. Among some other head scratchers. Fauci says it's a coin flip, 50/50 odds it came from a lab. More research is necessary, but it's worth keeping your mind open to new evidence.
  - btmorex 5y ago
    https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/wuhan-lab-covid-origin-theory/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/wuhan-lab-covid-orig... US intelligence reports that researchers from the virology lab in Wuhan were hospitalized with an unknown illness in November of 2019, most notably before the "patient #0" was infected.
  - msie 5y ago
    Some say it couldn’t have been designed: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html#xenforo-comments-1568 https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-la...
    - garmaine 5y ago
      That wasn’t the question.

jollybean 5y ago

But these things can affect real credibility if not superficial credibility. I wonder if it's worth staring a web-site where friendly scientists put papers side by side and say 'Was this a Rip Off'? Whereby at least the scammers get some form of possible public shaming for as long as the paper exists. I can just imagine that site coming up in web searches ... how could people not click it?

geraneum 5y ago
I wonder if there's already a tool that clusters papers by similarity or else how do the reviewers reject a paper on such ground. How do they find it? Do they know them all by heart? Maybe we (the community) can help by creating an open platform that scraps openly available papers and automatically finds and sorts similar ones.
- neutered_knot 5y ago
  I’m an academic computer scientist. I submit things I review through my institutions cheating detection system. I have found plagiarized submissions this way.
  - geraneum 5y ago
    I was not aware of it, thanks for the info. I followed up on the topic and found the famous ones.

ggggtez 5y ago

While I've never had an experience that bad, I've certainly peer reviewed utter garbage from one Chinese professor, who was publishing something like 200 papers a year. I don't care how many graduate students you have, there is no way all of that is original research. And in my case, it was an obfuscated version of a very well known theory that any freshman would know.

msie 5y ago

So your colleague submitted their paper before the other paper was posted to arXiv and yet it was still rejected? Crazy!

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
Yup. That was my reaction at first, too. Definitely taught me a lot about informal trust systems in academia.

SneakyTornado29 5y ago

Preprint servers for the win!

Retric 5y ago

The only appropriate response to that is to go scorched earth and try and get not just those to published the copied paper but the reviewer who linked it fired. And then make it very clear what the journal let happen to others in the field. Also, a DMCA request to arXiv would likely work.

jacobolus 5y ago
It’s unclear that stealing someone’s scientific ideas is a copyright violation. Though it may depend on exactly what was copied and how. > In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  The ideas themselves aren't but it appears the paper was a blatant copy, image by image, and this IS a copyright violation.
  - lodovic 5y ago
    "regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work" - didn't know this either, but apparently even image-by-image copies are allowed.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Scientific ideas are one thing, however if scientific papers don’t have copyright protection then Sci-Hub should be legally fine. So, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

JetAlone 5y ago

Reading about that makes me very angry. I long to see some justice for your colleague. Lots of good suggestions to guard with arXiv, I hope many young academics coming through read this post and learn from it. I wish I had something more substantive to add, but, all I can say is I hope your colleague knows that even if the swindlers and plagiarizers take our research, years of our lives, etc, be they in China or wherever the whole wide world else ain't able to take away the heart of a real one. They know the research ain't theirs, and they know they depend on real producers to be able to commit their crimes, or do anything actually useful and it's not the other way around. These plagiarists are parasites, and one day we'll be free of them.

zomglings 5y ago
Sadly, I cannot share your optimism. As long as metrics like impact factor and citation count determine the trajectories of academic careers, plagiarism, collusion, and other forms of academic dishonesty will not go a way. The fact of the matter is that most academics do not have time to dig into whether someone's work is intellectually dishonest. Being dishonest has a huge payoff as long as you don't cause a scandal. Anyone who plans to stay in academia should understand that the metagame has changed over the last 50 years. Largely because human attention has not scaled with rate at which academics are exposed to and expected to assimilate new information. There is a larger payoff to exploiting the lack of attention than to earnestly carrying out some meaningful research program. At the very least, do both. By no means do only the latter.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  "By no means do not only carry out meaningful research"? Happily, I cannot share your cynicism. There are metrics and citations being taken, of our dishonest acts. They determine the trajectories of virtually everything relevant to our lives, and can have momentous impacts on the lives of others. I cannot judge any other man or woman, but I know I would be a coward, a fool, and a fraud to diversify any kind of portfolio of mine in this life, by consciously choosing to sprinkle in some exploitation or lies.
  - 5y ago

N1H1L 5y ago

That's why you upload to arXiv the da you submit it - to prevent such blatant research theft.

anonporridge 5y ago
What happens if people start colluding behind the scenes of arXiv to change their records? Even if the people running it now are totally trustworthy, they won't be in control forever.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Archive.org
- 8192kjshad09- 5y ago
  Publicly tweet the hash of your PDF, email the hash of your PDF to yourself, upload your PDF to google drive, dropbox, github, and s3. Essentially the whole world would have to collude against you for someone to claim they wrote it before you.

auggierose 5y ago

That story doesn't sound very likely to me. If something like that actually happened, for sure your colleague didn't submit to a "quality" journal.

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
It wasn't Nature Materials, but it was one of the top journals for that branch of materials science. I think we were shooting for IF 5 to 10, but I wasn't involved in the work beyond editing the rebuttal.
- auggierose 5y ago
  IF is a ridiculous measure in the first place. It says nothing about quality. It once was an interesting number from a purely observational point of view, but once journals are actually rated by it, it has no meaning any more.

rdevsrex 5y ago

Why can’t academics insert some sort of cryptographic proof of ownership or publication date? The ownership could be done with something like Keybase, and as far as dates, that could be as simple as private Git repo that you make public or some fancy blockchain solution. But I suppose even then, people could look the other way.

tablespoon 5y ago

atoav 5y ago
Or use other ways that proof you had the work before anybody has the chance of copying it.

cycomanic 5y ago

Can you give some more details? What field was that in? Can you maybe point to the arxiv paper? What was the journal your colleague submitted to? I'm trying to understand your story because many details are very different from the things I know about scientific publishing. Your colleague was a grad student who researched and conducted an experiment in a new field without a supervisor (you say there wasn't a coauthor with enough research cloud)? This never happens in my field and pretty much any technical field I'm aware of. It then went to the review process and was rejected six month later because a reviewer found (a "copy" of) the paper on arxiv? And the rejection reason was lack of novelty? In many fields arxiv does not count as a "already published" . In particular if the submission date of the article is before the article showing up on arxiv. Also you say the article on arxiv was very obviously copied. So did this result in plagiarism investigations? While there are many things wrong with the current review process, accusations of instances of plagiarism are typically dealt with very quickly and in my experience pretty much always results in the editors in chief getting involved. So did this happen? Also in my experience there is generally much more scepticism against chinese authors than western authors when this happens. The quality of research and publications from China has dramatically increased in the last 5-10 years though.

KirillPanov 5y ago
The comment you're replying to was quite detailed. Any additional data would identify the paper and therefore the person, transforming OP's comment from an anecdote into a use of HN for griefing purposes. Let's not do that.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  No there is clearly not enough detail to assess the story. Apart from the question if it is justified to name the Arxiv paper (I believe pointing out scientific dishonesty publicly is very important), he could have named the field and journal without revealing anything. I clearly pointed out some gaps in the story that everyone vaguely familiar with scientific publishing would find, that's why I'm asking for clarification.

aba_cz 5y ago

EU has an eIDAS law about qualified signatures and timestamps for years with even an original open-source implementation from EU. You can add it to the PDF and keep it on your machine. It's verifiable by any court in the EU because it's "unbreakable". We use it for every document when communicating with officials and I think more people should do that. You don't need cool blockchains and stuff when you have cryptography.

IceWreck 5y ago

> He ended up graduating two years later than planned. This is so unfair, some cheaters from China got free research papers to their name and the legit author had to waste two years of their life

webmaven 5y ago

> Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. Could you clarify whether the duplicate paper was also submitted to the same journal or elsewhere, and if submitted whether it was accepted? I'm trying to figure out whether the point was to steal credit, or to spike your colleague's submission. > We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. Yeah this is the sort of thing that seems to only ever get resolved if a public stink is made, often on social media these days, because the integrity of both the editor and the journal is being implicated, which ends up with the can of worms[0] being swept under the rug if at all possible. Of course people are going to keep tripping over the bump in the rug, and your colleague might not even have been the first victim. [0] Having to check everything else the editor has ever done for similar misconduct, potentially retractions galore, making victims whole, process improvements, etc.