challenges for arXiv

["Ann Okerson" <aokerson@gmail.com>]

>From CHE's afternoon report today:

Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics 
Server

Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work 
have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint 
server where many physicists post their work before publication, 
Nature (subscription required) is reporting. According to the 
article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities 
were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that 
they "plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate 
levels of overlap with earlier articles."

Nature quotes Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at the Middle 
East Technical University whose name was on 40 of the problematic 
papers, defending his work: "Most of our papers have been 
published in the science citation index journals. Until now no 
one has claimed that we plagiarize."

Suspicions were apparently stoked when, during oral defenses of 
their dissertations last fall, Mr. Salti and another student 
demonstrated a poor grasp of even the most basic of physics 
concepts. Professors at the university began to investigate the 
students' work and turned up several examples of plagiarized work 
by them, as well as by students and professors at three other 
Turkish universities - Dicle University, the University of 
Mersin, and Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University.

The investigating professors notified the moderators of the arXiv 
site, which is based at Cornell University. The service's 
founder, Paul Ginsparg, told Nature that the incident was the 
worst case of plagiarism the site had ever experienced.

copyright 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education