Thoughts on publishing ethics

Here's a piece on publishing ethics I did for Wiley's website on the subject. 

Where should one start a blog entry about publication ethics? It’s such a wide-ranging topic and, given that this isn’t supposed to be a book length entry, I will just pick on a couple of issues that I have seen occur over the years, either in one of the journals that I co-edit or that I have come across during conversations with fellow editors.

Over the years you begin to delude yourself into thinking that you have seen the full range of ethics infringements.  It’s particularly ironic, I guess, when you edit bioethics journals: you would hope that your authors would be clued in to publication ethics issues.   

We have seen quite a bit of plagiarism over the years. We do subject manuscripts toCrosscheck, both randomly as well as when we have reason to be suspicious of the provenance of some of the content claimed as original by an author. Now, given that we process hundreds of manuscripts each year, what does raise suspicion? Obvious stuff really: if an author whose first language isn’t English submits a manuscript that suffers fairly consistently from low quality English language expression, and suddenly there are a few pages of impeccable English, you would probably wonder how those impeccable bits came about. Sometimes there are perfectly innocent explanations, such as authors having had a friend copy-edit parts of their manuscript, but not all of it. On other occasions you discover that some material has indeed been plagiarized.  

You might also come across content that looks a little bit too familiar. Journal editors probably pick up on plagiarism for no other reason than that they send submitted papers out for review by true subject experts. More often than not they give you a heads-up on possibly plagiarized content. Funnily enough, this is how I came across a plagiarized paper for the first time in my academic life. The former editors of the journal that I now edit asked me to review a manuscript on a topic that I had just published a paper on. True enough, the paper they asked me to review was identical (to the title of the article) to my previously published piece. Go figure.

I don’t think, courtesy of legal restraints, we do a good job these days of dealing with obvious cases of plagiarism. We do a good job flagging a duplicate publication, as that is fairly easy to show. Plagiarism is becoming an endangered category. The reason, probably, is that to call something plagiarized content you’d need to prove intent if an accused author ever decided to sue you for libel. So, it seems to me that these days most instances of plagiarism are labeled as incidents of duplicate publication. The thing is, duplicate publication didn’t historically refer to duplicating other people’s content and pretending that it’s your own, but to duplicating your own content. The former would have been called plagiarism. The latter would have been called duplicate publication. Today both cases are most often referred to as duplicate publication due to fear of litigation.

Let me give you two examples, both from journals that I edit. We had large parts of an article we had published plagiarized in a medical journal. The author of the plagiarized content also happened to be a senior editorial board member of the medical journal that published said piece, and a senior bioethicist in the region. The medical journal’s editor investigated the matter and decided to publish an erratum regretting the inadvertent duplicate publication. And that was that. No professional sanction occurred, everyone happily pretended that the blatant verbatim copying of large parts of our original content was inadvertent. Nonsense. In addition, some academic institutions have been known to ignore information showing that their faculty were caught plagiarizing other people’s work.

The other example happened just a week or two ago. Academics submitted a paper to us that we accepted after peer review. They duly signed the standard disclosure form in which they assured us in writing that their content was original, and that it hadn’t been submitted or published elsewhere. We received a tip-off that the empirical component of the article we accepted (including a number of tables) had actually already been published in a local medical journal – and that indeed turned out to be the case. We emailed the authors of said document to ‘please explain’ and have yet to receive so much as an acknowledgment of receipt of our message. Either way, we caught this one. In many documents this kind of duplicate publication would be referred to as self-plagiarism. That’s a misnomer. You can’t plagiarize your own content; plagiarism by definition involves the theft of someone else’s intellectual property and it involves the thief pretending that it is his or her own. Clearly you cannot steal your own intellectual content, hence there is no such a thing as self-plagiarism.

I have great difficulty understanding why anyone would even try to publish plagiarized content. In this day and age, whole computer programs trawl academic publications non-stop, searching automatically for plagiarized content. Incidentally, one of the cases mentioned above came to my attention via this route. Why anyone would wish to subject themselves to the risk of getting caught is truly beyond me. Perhaps academics engaging in misconduct are banking on a lack ofenforceable regulations. Unless their employer punishes their misconduct, the worst that can happen to them is that a particular journal bans them from submitting (for a while). Perhaps publishers and groups such as COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) should come together and discuss whether more significant punitive measures could deter more authors from engaging in forms of academic misconduct.

The website Retraction Watch keeps track of many academic journal retractions. Check it out when you have a minute.  And COPE has developed a number of really useful flowcharts on what we as Editors should do if we come across cases of suspected plagiarism or duplicate publication. I recommend them to your attention. You might find them helpful whether you are an author or a journal editor.

The Dangers of Open Access Online Only

I know that I sound a bit like a broken record when I continue to go on and on and on about the problems associated with the current Open Access frenzy. The problems are all too obvious. For starters: low barriers to entry are an invite to fly-by-night operators. These days it is fair to say that dodgy Open Access outfits outnumber by far the very few decent Open Access publishers. Open Access as it is currently conceived constitutes also a direct threat to the ability of academics to publish their work in professional journals. If Open Access replaces subscription based models, an author's ability to pay the Open Access fees determines whether an academic is able to afford publishing her work. The fees in question range anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per article. To be fair, a VERY limited number of universities has begun shelling out $$ for Open Access fees for their academic researchers. Say, if you were an academic working in one of those exceptional institutions and you decided to publish in an Open Access outlet you'd go to your university's research office or its library and ask that it transfer the cash required for getting your article published to the Open Access publisher. The more you publish the more expensive you become to your cash strapped employer. No doubt some such institutions will begin to love the old days again when academics didn't publish that much, simply because that would be cheaper. Or there might be a $$ limit on the number of papers you may publish, you might also find yourself suddenly strongly encouraged by the powers that are in your university to publish where it is cheapest. - Talking about cheaper, the true free riders in this system would, of course, be institutions the academics of which publish preciously little (think Phoenix and similar outfits). They're the true beneficiaries of OA. It is noteworthy though, that free riding is encouraged in this system. Whoever produces research pays for the luxury of seeing it published. Anyone else is in for a free ride. Yep, that is Open Access justice. - Most institutions, of course, have neither the money nor the inclination to spend $$ on the article processing fee the Open Access business model depends on. Hence the threat to academic researchers' ability to publish their academic content in an Open Access world.

Still, this is all old news, except, of course, to the having-your-cake-and-eating-it Open Access proponents. What is news is that one of my dire predictions has since come to pass. I warned on various occasions that these fly-by-night operators have no back-up systems in place for the point in time where they switch off their little web-servers and shut down their operations. Articles 'published' on their servers, I warned, would disappear into the internet's never-never-land. This danger is one reason for why I am such a Luddite with regard to the need for print versions of published peer reviewed content. It is the only guarantee that we have that  peer reviewed content can be easily traced via university libraries. It is the only watertight guarantee we have, in so far as protecting the integrity of the published academic outputs are concerned. If there's no print copy, we might sometimes be able to find individual article pdf's of authors who published on Open Access platforms that vanished over night, but there is no guarantee. This has all sorts of undesirable consequences for articles that have been cited (say by a doctoral student in her research thesis - how could a reviewer tasked with evaluating said thesis do that job if some of her cited articles don't exist any longer due to the collapse of the Open Access outfit that published them?)

Well, here's a link to a bona fide report about such an Open Access fly-by-night outfit having closed operations, with the complete loss of all its published contents. The virtual journals gone, it is not only the loss of articles published there that is of concern, it also means that crucial information about the journal is gone, too. Did it undertake peer review? Was there an editorial board? -

And yes, I told you so... -  QED as they say.

Archives of Sexual Behavior Reportedly Refuses to Retract Ex-gay Study

A very significant story was published today in The American Prospect, unfortunately buried in the middle of an introspective story by the writer of the piece. 


It's about Robert Spitzer's 'ex-gay' study. Dr Robert Spitzer is - today - an 80 year old retired psychiatrist whose area of specialisation was sex research. He was, for most of his academic life, affiliated with Columbia University in New York. Spitzer's work has been very influential, he is credited - among others - with having significant influence in the USA on the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness.  


Spitzer also published a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that well and truly made him notorious both among gay activist as well as among the homophobes of the world. The study in question interviewed a sample of gay folks who had undergone 'reparative' therapy aimed at changing their sexual orientation. Spitzer concluded, based on those interviews, that some highly motivated gay people could change their sexual orientation. 


The study has been vigorously criticized over the years, not least because its claims are based on self-reporting of 'ex-gay' folks who usually came from cultural (not to say fanatically religious) contexts where homosexuality was highly frowned upon (that's probably putting it too mildly still). Now, for a gay evangelical Christian to claim after 'reparative therapy; they he or she ain't gay any longer is understandable, given that the homophobic ideology they're hoping to fit into doesn't allow them to be who they are to begin with. It's another story to buy such self-reporting. 


Here's the relevant bit from the American Prospect article. Spitzer is quoted as saying: In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” he said. “The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” He said he spoke with the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, but the editor declined.' 


The study in question has been used for many years by anti-gay activists as evidence that homosexual people can change their sexual orientation - and that they're blameworthy if they don't try to do so, given that homosexuality is an 'abomination' or an 'objective disorder' (as one of the churches operating on my university campus will have it). 


I think it's remarkable that the journal that published Spitzer's original findings refuses him the right to publish a retraction notice. We know now from countless examples that self-reported 'ex-gays' turned out to be - surprise, surprise - current gays. 


Addendum: 5:40pm EST - Usually well-informed sources tell me that the Archives of Sexual Behavior does not recall Spitzer's reported request - but it's all off-the-record. This leads to the following questions: 1) Did Spitzer tell the truth in the interview? 2) Did Spitzer actually say what he is reported saying? 3) Is the off-the-record information from the Archives a true reflection of what happened? I certainly don't know.
Addendum: 07:08am EST -The Archives have finally gone on record on this matter.Check out their entirely sensible views on the matter here. Over to Dr Spitzer. 

Self-Plagiarism - a misnomer if there ever was one

If you browse documents on academic misconduct you'll bump sooner or later into the term 'self-plagiarism'. Students in many universities are threatened with sanctions if they submit plagiarized as well as self-plagiarized content in seminar papers.

I take issue with this. There is no such thing as self-plagiarism. It's a misnomer. Plagiarism's defining feature is that it involves the theft of someone else's intellectual content and the attempt to pass off this intellectual content as one's own. So, I steal someone else's content and claim it is my own intellectual, creative contribution in a paper or some other medium.

What goes for self-plagiarism is nothing of that sort. I use my own content and recycle it in another paper I produce. This might involve using text blocks from an older paper in the new paper without referencing the text as such. Or it might involve the rewriting of text from an older paper in a new manuscript.


Now, because there is no theft of intellectual property involved, calling this plagiarism seems wrong to me. It also seems to me as if such behavior is not necessarily wrong. Let me give you a couple of examples. Say I invent a new method in genetics research and I re-use it time and again. Is it really wrong to copy-paste the description of my method in the method section of paper I produce? I doubt it. Equally, thinking about my own field. Say I got famous for having said something remarkable about the ethics of human enhancement. Obviously, I will be invited by textbook authors, journal editors, encyclopedia producers and whatnot to write my argument afresh for them. Is acceding to those requests really wrong? I doubt it. I might also be asked to reproduce my argument/analysis for a different audience (say a different language journal or a different audience comprised of readers of a specialist journal etc). Would it really be wrong to re-use content from an older paper I wrote without diligently referencing every single line of my own analysis? I doubt it. I also think that if you believe you have a really good idea, you'd aim to promote it, instead of burying it in one paper that might be missed by the community you hope to reach with your analysis.

Where what is called mistakenly self-plagiarism is wrong is:
1) when students are required to write an original piece for a seminar and it is made explicit by the teacher that they must not use content they produced earlier. The 'crime' here would lie in the violation of the rule though, and not in the renewed use of one's own intellectual material.
2) when the same argument is published in different journals with similar target audiences.  Doing this gives the mistaken impression that there's a deluge of interest in your particular analysis, while other content is prevented from getting published. Current guidelines tend to see this as a breach of etiquette rather than a capital crime (in publishing ethics terms).
3) more difficult is it when people re-use their content in multiple papers and then add it to their CVs. This is so, because these CVs are used to attract research funding (ie impress review committees), get promotions and stuff like that. I see this as more difficult, because more often than not, only bits and pieces of content are recycled. It's rarely the whole shebang published earlier. My view would be that the onus should be on the reviewers to ascertain the originality or lack thereof of papers listed on CVs. Alternatively, academics could be required to state per paper/book listed on their CVs to what extent the individual publications constitute original contributions. In any case, the violation here is not related to the integrity of the academic content but to do with other matters altogether.

My view would be that we should do away with the general term of 'self-plagiarism', because it is a misnomer, and that instead we should describe more carefully under what circumstances the recycling of one's own intellectual content is ethically problematic.  I hope to have shown that what is called today self-plagiarism is not at all always wrong, but that it can be wrong under certain circumstances.

I should stress what is true for everything posted on this blog, this is my personal view on this matter, no more, no less. 

Any comments?