An occasional correspondent writes:
You might find this interesting.
If you find some use for this, I’d appreciate it if you did not quote me as the source.
It’s the story of an alleged incident of plagiarism that goes like this: a pair of researchers sent an article to a journal, the journal editor suggested changes in the paper that they didn’t want to make, so they withdrew the paper from the journal, . . . and then the editor retaliated by publishing the paper in his journal under his own name! The editor made some small changes, but according to the original authors, those were superficial changes and it was clearly a plagiarized article. The editor then had the chutzpah to send the article to one of the original authors.
What a horrible story.
I’ve never had a journal editor plagiarize from me, but on the occasions that my ideas have been ripped off, I’ve found it very annoying, almost a form of harassment in that the plagiarist is, by his actions, demonstrating that he has the power to take my work and publish them under his name.
Here’s my (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism.
P.S. We also came across this interesting news article by Priya Krishna, “Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking.” In general, copyright does not protect information; it protects the particular expression of information. So you can rip off someone’s recipe and publish it without attribution, but you won’t be breaking any laws. This reminds me of a discussion we had a few years ago regarding the practice of copying chess anecdotes without attribution: it can make you look like an idiot (for example, writing “All in all Akiba Rubinstein played 1985 tournament games in his life, of which 1763 had rook endgames” or reporting that George Alcock MacDonnell lost a game eleven years after he died), but it’s not copyright violation.
As a sidenote to the copyright thing — because facts cannot be copyrighted in the US, data generally speaking is not eligible for copyright in the USA. DataBASES can be copyrighted, due to the creative activity of choosing which facts to collect and how to store or present them, but the data themselves are not eligible for protection. This always comes to mind for me when I find a data repository — OpenStreetMap is one such place, but there’s some scientific archives that do the same — claiming their data is under a more restrictive license than US laws allow. While the services can certainly have you sign a EULA agreeing to more restrictive terms, and revoke your access if you break them, if you get the data from a third party there’s absolutely nothing they can do.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it always strikes me as funny when I find data packages saying you MUST give attribution`and so on. It’s certainly polite and I always do, but “must” has nothing to do with it.
The whole thing about plagiarism is very much a sign of the times. It’s not something that really crossed our minds 20-30 years ago.
It’s a horrible story. But there are individuals like that editor who seem to inhabit an incomprehensible moral universe. Who consider anything as grist to the mill of their own advancement…
Our students receive “plagiarism training” – e.g. “in this session students receive guidance on the types of plagiarism and how to avoid these” which I always feel should say: “in this session students receive guidance on the types of plagiarism and are told not to do it”!
I suppose 20-30 years ago we weren’t really able to “cut and paste” (or “copy and paste”) and it would almost be more effort to hand copy someone’s text than it would be to write something original
Chris:
It might not have crossed your mind 20 years ago, but it was happening to me back then!
Your idea of plagiarism as “cut and paste” is naive.
Plagiarism DID exist 20 or 30 years ago.
It does not have anything to do with being able to “cut and paste”.
You are misguided and wrong.
I am sorry for my matter-of-a-fact style message, but you are like someone denying the evidence that the earth isn’t flat. I don’t know what to say. Please review your ideas about plagiarism.
Hink the issue isn’t whether it existed, but how rampant is it. Today in one masters program I know about there are something like 5 SERIOUS cases a year and all of them are “Google something then cut and paste” and that simply didn’t exist 30 years ago.
Of course more traditional types certainly did, but we’re much less rampant.
Cut-and-paste plagiarism is also the easiest kind to detect. If academic programs are taking a more active stance against plagiarism today than they were 30 years ago, it’s likely both because it’s more rampant and because there are tools to make some level of policing easy.
I heard this from an acquaintance. He pointed out an error in a math paper in a talk, and then Audience Member A stole that idea and published it (after sending it to my acquaintance for comment; my acquaintance pointed out that it was his idea, but that’s not how A remembered it). However, the two authors of the original erroneous papers were big enough in their field, and angry enough about being shown to be in error, that they were able to basically blackball A, and completely stalled his (A’s) career. So the two types of misconduct cancelled each other out, sort of.
I’m often a bit skeptical about claims about “stealing ideas”; how do we know they did not have the same idea independently? How do we know they didn’t connect the dots themselves (standing on shoulders…)? And then we have Stigler’s law of eponymy and hindsight bias! Definitely not saying it isn’t happening, some of the cases presented here are clear, but often it’s not…
Claire:
It’s not always clear, but sometimes it is! We often see cases where person X writes something and then person Y publishes it without citing X. For example, search this blog for Wegman or Hesse. For example, it would defy credulity to believe that Hesse independently came up with the claim that, “All in all Akiba Rubinstein played 1985 tournament games in his life, of which 1763 had rook endgames,” given that the statement was actually a joke that was published elsewhere.
I’m pretty confident in the claims of uncredited copying that we’ve discussed on this blog, but perhaps we should be concerned by a selection bias in that we often write about the most egregious cases because they are so clear; meanwhile there are lots and lots of fuzzier examples out there, which I guess is related to your point.