RE: challenges for arXiv

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

It is interesting to note that a number of these papers went on 
to be published in the journal literature.  According to the 
Nature article 
(http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070903/full/449008b.html - 
subscription required)

> 'So far, the search has turned up 67 papers, about half of 
> which have appeared in low-profile peer-review journals.'

It is surely a matter of concern that not only were these papers 
deposited on arXiv, but the peer-review process failed to spot 
alleged plagiarized material.

David Prosser
SPARC Europe

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Ann Okerson
Sent: 06 September 2007 23:36
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: challenges for arXiv

>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