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I have zero compassion for ArXiv. Allow me to share a horror story: I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a
by rebanevapustus 2y ago
I have zero compassion for ArXiv.
Allow me to share a horror story:
I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a half-finished paper draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in ArXiv and a "real" journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/30/stephensons-alternative-universes/ https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/30/stephensons-alternat...
In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both ArXiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all.
I went all the way to contacting Stanford, the institution that the thief falsely pretended to be affiliated with, to get them to help me with this.
Stanford contacted ArXiv, and ArXiv then:
1. Removed the thief's upload: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14810 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14810
2. Allowed the thief to copyright strike MY (!!!!) own research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214
How does this make any sense? You remove somebody's stolen content, and then allow the thief to copyright strike it? what the fuck...
- OutOfHere 2y agoI am not supporting the theft, but it will make better sense when you realize that copyright holds little value in the real world outside of the court system. Next time, keep your repo private until you're ready to release everything together.
- cwbriscoe 2y agoI am sure he didn't need your "wise" advice to keep his repo private in the future.
- OutOfHere 2y agoHe is grossly misrepresenting Arxiv. It is not an appropriate place for a copyright fight.
- DaSHacka 2y agoThat's not their call to make. They have no right to host GP's intellectual property and refuse to take it down after being contacted by the rightful owner.
- OutOfHere 2y agoYou're not paying any at all. Arxiv did not refuse to take it down. Arxiv did take it down even though they had no obligation to do so. Also, anyone can claim anything online, and it's the timing of papers that ultimately matters.
- rebanevapustus 2y agoThey did refuse to take it down. You have no idea how many emails were exchanged, attempts at explaining them what a commit log is, what verified commits are...to just refuse to do anything until Stanford weighed in. It is incredibly condescending to say "arXiv is not a place for a copyright strike". as if I decided to start one. If somebody gets robbed in front of a place of worship/whatever, would you scold the victim by saying that's not the place to get robbed? Incredible.
- nextaccountic 2y agoCopyright, as in the right to prevent other people from making copies, indeed is meaningless unless you have lawyers But plagiarism is a serious academic misconduct, that gets papers retracted, people fired from academic positions, PhDs rescinded, etc. It's not at all a copyright issue and would remain a gross misconduct even if copyright were abolished today
- forgotpwd16 2y agoMost academic nutjobs tend to build a world of their own with gibberish papers. This dude instead decided to take others' work and has even gotten an identity theft charge on him. For your question, fraudulent copyright infringement claims are plaguing most services hosting content (GitHub, YouTube, etc). Haven't seen it again on ArXiv so chances are it's a rare occurrence. So the admins probably weren't sure what to do. At least in the comments, they make it clear, it wasn't due to policy (as mentioned in the stolen paper) that yours was removed but essentially due to being forced by the claims. What surprised me was that a journal in MDPI garbage land, published an expression of concern.