You really need to read the article. It's a quote. The blog piece is not a disquisition on irrelevancy, it's on academic theft and lack of recognition for "purloined writing"
The title is a quote from a professor's assistant insisting that "blogs aren't real scientific publications". The (to me) blatant plagiarism of the blog author seems pretty awful, as does the insistence that the blog is "beneath their notice".
I suspect the title of this article is going to get a lot of commenters who don't read the article.
On topic: It seems like the author was directly plagiarized, and it sounds like the perpetrators are handwaving lawyers at them. If I were them, I'd write to the head of their faculty or their dean; I suspect the university wouldn't want to be associated with potential plagiarism (and I suspect their lawyers would recommend getting the citation approved).
Lots of peer review papers refer to non peer review content. It's not wrong to refer to URI of note. Not to do so, this egregiously stinks of passing off others work.
Some software, such as gnu "parallels" requests peer review academics to cite use of their code, on an honour system. Sqlite is citable, if you search Google examples how are visible high in search return.
In my experience, journals are surprisingly (?) uninterested in these sort of things. The university will then just refer to the journal and reply that the claim of plagiarism must be fabricated as the journal would surely have done something.
I sold a line of high end r&d tools to university labs; they became engines to knock off each others work. The least ethical group of buyers I ever worked with!
The professor's "work" wasn't published through a university; She published the work as a company she directs.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
The "Nobody cares about your blog" statement, in this case, is not a dismissive, if accurate, statement about an anonymous blogger, or low viewership blogs in general.
It's a self-serving excuse written by a person who cares a lot, obviously, because all their images came from the blogger in question's site.
She’s been in and around the University of Zürich since 2007[1]. No doubt she has the political capital to weather anything. Kevin Kruse got caught red handed [2] plagiarising and Princeton buried it[3].
Universities are political organisations before academic ones.
Academic community is in wide discussion about this story (it is juicy) and the response is uniform shock and horror. She’s absolutely not going to have a career in the very very near future.
It appears that the entire journal is fraudulent (stock photos for people who apparently work there).
Hmm. It looks like it wasn't buried, but investigated by two different bodies and no ill intent was found.
The author of the content that was one of the allegations said:
>Bayor, who Magness had accused Kruse of plagiarizing, has previously told the ‘Prince’ that the accusations against Kruse were “politically motivated” and that “there is not a story here.”
I can’t believe Rossi wouldn’t cite you or at least acknowledge you in some note in her publication! And to say the value of your blog is “nil” while copying your work (including your commentary) is beyond parody… Entitled academia strikes again!
Merry Christmas :), your blog is fascinating and I’ll read through some of the other posts too!
If I had to guess, I'd assume that's because properly citing would out her as not having done a bunch of the work she claimed to have done i.e. actual research.
Everything else reads like classic misdirection of someone caught red-handed.
Someone should post a link to the blog somewhere where the experts on the topic would see it. Like, if this was a machine learning blog, posting it on r/MachineLearning could destroy the offender’s academic reputation.
I wonder to what extent the assistant quoted in the post is writing things that Rossi would not? Maybe they’d agree, and maybe the lack of acknowledgment in the book speaks for itself, but I think it’s jumping the gun a bit to attribute things from this professor’s secretary to the professor herself. Presumably if you’re a professor’s secretary then part of your job when talking to journalists, etc, is making the professor and therefore the university look important.
It’s a shame the article didn’t have a comment directly from Rossi but maybe they tried to get one and failed.
Especially because lawyers should be the last thing they want involved here. It’s waived about as intimidation but is more threatening to them than the blogger. Whoever wrote that eating a pound of pride for breakfast every morning as they practice condescending sneers in the mirror. And may quite possibly be the academic assistant that plagiarized the blog in the first place gathering material for their boss.
If you don’t like seeing this sort of thing, actually reach out to the organizations that Prof Carla Rossi is associated with. Let them know that this is not okay.
I emailed everyone listed on that page with a link to the blog post.
Finding their email addresses is mostly straightforward, it's on their institutional pages most of the time. Note that one of them is deceased since 2021, which does make me wonder how relevant this list is now.
Nice work finding this indeed! This sounds like it could become a nice story for Coffeezilla. It's increasingly looking to me like it's an outright scam. Strange that it's for such low stakes as academic prestige, usually they go straight for the money.
An anecdotal observation: when an academic needs a personal assistant to manage their email it is because they have become better at the grant game than they were in their field.
I don't know enough about academics to agree or disagree, but this passge gave me pause:
> This precipitated a correspondence with Noemi De Santis, who explained "I am Professor Rossi's secretary, who is not aware of our correspondence. I manage her mail account."
I'm surprised a professor would have a secretary handle their correspondence. That does sound like an entitled environment.
Per other comments in the thread, Ms. De Santis might be imaginary and just a way to puff Ms. Rossi up. At the least, her portrait was a stock photograph on the staff page of RECEPTIO.
Same, I blog as a record of stuff I’m researching because writing about it helps me organize thoughts and remember. I won’t remember for long though, so it works as a record for me as well. I think the stuff I research is really fascinating, though niche, and assume a few other people out there would be interested too. None of my local friends are as interested, so the global reach helps me chat about it with others. Finally, I also like the ethos of creating the kind of content you want to see on the Internet, so doing my little part.
That could be the case for the author of the blog in question, and it would still be legitimate to take issue with someone passing off the work as their own.
However as with any code I published I would be fairly annoyed were someone to lift it and present it as their own without either first contacting me (which is trivial) or citing me.
I have found a lot of references to things I have done on google scholar et al and I am flattered to have been included.
I don’t understand why anyone would risk being caught out like this. Citing is trivial and indicates you have done research and then built on someone else’s work.
The title here on HN should get corrected to at least include the quotation marks.
Those mail responses sound like they actually care a lot, maybe not about doing proper work or research, but certainly about getting caught red handed.
FYI, the actual title is "Nobody cares about your blog!" - pretty big difference from what is shown on HN
"The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition."
It's all about how an academic plagiarized from the blog of this person, and then the academic's secretary completely dismissed it with statements such as - "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"
Ironically, a long blog post I wrote in 2015 has over 50 citations (more than most of my papers as an academic, amusingly) according to Google Scholar, so clearly others don't feel the same.
How does one cite a blog in a publication? And how do you track it on Google scholar? Quite curious because this is the first time hearing about this - and as an academic it is quite interesting.
Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?
You can cite anything whose veracity or authority can be established in some way.
Websites are easy as per that criteria.
The one I find annoying is when people cite like this. According to XYZ [1].... It establishes where the idea comes from, but sometimes lacks details that are needed to reconstruct the idea.
Once i was looking for a paper, to construct a list of interesting sources for a professor I was working for.
It was a paper on a very relevant topic that would really be of interest. It had been cited in a dozen different papers, or so. But I could not find the cited paper anywhere!
I realized I could find the author of the cited paper, and just email them. They said "Oh, that was a conference presentation, it was never published as a paper anywhere, only presented orally at the conference."
Fine. Except... most of these citations didn't cite it as a conference presentation. Most of the citers, I am pretty sure were not at that conference. They just copy and pasted the citation from other papers, thinking the same as me, oh, that seems a useful cite. The first couple times it was cited, it might have actually been cited as a conference presentation at a particular conference on a particular date, but that wound up omitted from future copy pastes.
I don't think this was a particularly unusual occurence. Many citations are... unreliable.
A citation to something with an actual URL is pretty good.
You certainly should always acknowledge prior work, whatever the format even if it's just some scribbles on a napkin. If it doesn't qualify for a citation there are also acknowledgments sections.
Depends on the publication and the style guide they use. The ones I’m most familiar with are MLA & APA and they both have formats for how they want blogs cited.
I’m not sure how a blog would make the leap into being indexed as part of Google scholar though, unless it was first cited in a more traditional academic paper that fell into their domain.
I did a little bit of poking around on Google Scholar, and while it shows me that I have a few dozen posts cited in academic papers, none of those posts show up as their own entry in the results.
At my school (bsc. applied computer science at fi.muni.cz about 13 years ago), we had a special course[1] where you learned that you need to cite anything important which you haven't come up with yourself and at the same time it's not trivial knowledge. Otherwise, you are basically deceiving readers (people will assume that you come up with something which you actually didn't) and you lower value/impact you make with your work (people can't follow through the sources). We were even asked to cite help menu or manual of an application as an exercise. Using google one can find similar guidelines about blogs in particular[2].
I understand it would look bad if your publication is citing only few blogs, but in such case the actual problem is that you need find existing publications or books in your area as well. Deciding that you won't cite a blog while you are using it for your work is not a solution to that.
I haven't used google scholar, but is the problem with limited knowledge of the tool that one don't know how to do it? Or is the tool itself limited? This makes me wonder whether the tools which doesn't easily allow one to track citations properly are part of the problem. This was definitely not a problem with bibtex[3]. Either way, that is not an excuse to basically commit an academic fraud.
FWIW, I've run into this with preprints. I had a paper up on a preprint server, and it was under review for a while. In the meantime, I became aware of another paper that pretty clearly used my paper and an earlier closely related one (to the point that some of the language was the same), passing it off as original. When this came up, their response was pretty similar to that in the OP here: things not formally peer reviewed "don't count" and essentially don't exist (and presumably are fair game to plagiarize?).
The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.
If you care enough about something to write a blog about it, that means at the very least one person cares about your blog. And, like, that's enough. Also, once there are other people who care about your stuff, they most likely just won't tell you about it. (What's the last time you told a stranger online that you like their stuff?) So maybe there's some person out there who's just waiting to find your blog, read through all the posts, put you in their feedreader and always be excited when you put out something new, caring about your stuff quietly in the background.
You have no idea, I’m only here myself to represent my boss’s condescending attitude and tone on whatever strikes his interest on HN on any given day.
He can’t be bothered to comment himself but nonetheless has the XKCD “There’s someone wrong on the internet!” complex so I get stuck posting here. I’m safe writing this since he also makes me cherry pick any replies to read back to him, doesn’t do it himself.
All in all I guess it’s not so bad though, better than writing condescending & mild legal threats to bloggers whose work you boss ripped off.
$10 per karma point. A bonus for every milestone of 100 and 1000 points. I trained on GPT-3 not long ago though so most of my posts these days are low effort curation of the output.
She was contacted via her email address at "RECEPTIO", the company she now directs. It's not clear whether she is still currently working as a professor, despite still using the title.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
Web pages, blogs in eye of professor, are just exactly like your ancestors thinking that Native American are not human, so thier lands are open for grabs.
Actually, quite a bit of people read my blog... Well maybe it's a lot of plagiarizing bots reading it too, but at least there is a lot of activity. It would be nice if I could make a living off of blogging without plastering ads everywhere (I don't). What's funny is that there are thousands of organic reads on my blog, but somehow the associated Twitter account has been stuck on 8 followers for the past 5 years.
Nobody cares about the Twitter account perhaps.
As we get into more innovations such as ChatGPT and "AI" Personality, Image (Stable Diffusion), and Music generation (Technically which are somewhat scripts that literally scrape the internet and prior works to smash together "new" derivative Frankensteinian works) we're looking as a grim future of content theft, and the agricultural mining of independent intellectual work, which will mean that individual independent thoughts and works will become worthless the minute they are published online. Eventually, brilliant minds will go quiet, and then suddenly "AI" will begin to falter, and that's when people will know they should have bookmarked your old (now gone private blog)
It seems like the plagiarizing author was simply too arrogant to even consider a simple email outreach along the lines of, “Hi! We seem to share an interest here. Would you be willing to share what you have with me for my own work?”
Which would both avoided the awkwardness (to put it mildly— academic integrity can be fragile… unless it’s a blog you plagiarize? Anyway…) and resulted in a higher quality work by the plagiarist who might have obtained access to more portions &/or higher resolution images.
Placing arrogance as some flavor of pride— the overly proud and prideful of the world are in some circle of a Venn diagram that overlaps significantly with the set of people that make the world a shitty place at times.
I suspect laziness was a factor. Too lazy to contact the blogger, maybe too lazy to record where they even got the images. They could be telling the truth about not knowing about OP's blog!
I recently spoke at a conference, and had some interested audience members approach me after to discuss more. One said he really valued the content and asked if I had published a paper outlining the same. I replied that I had not, but I did write about it in a blog. He said, “Ah, that’s a shame,” and walked away.
That Twitter thread is above my paygrade, but NE's final sentence (addressed to three other people working in his field) is rather relevant to this discussion "If this cipher has already been discovered, let me know where so I can give credit."
I'm so sick of "higher" educational institutions pretending they're some bastions of professional knowledge. I continue to toy around with the idea of going back to school for a PhD, but then I talk to friends who are or have done that, and their experiences don't sound like anything that would be useful.
I can read a research paper right now (and I do read research papers when they're helpful to the situation at hand). I can write an article, make a video, or share some interesting thing I learned in a professional manner without ever submitting it to a journal. I don't need a PhD to pursue learning as much as I can about the field of Computer Science, and I highly doubt a PhD will offer me any significant advantages in this pursuit. Especially after my experience getting a B.S degree (pun fully intended).
I can't wait for the day when we recognize that educational institutions don't actually signify any more authority than a random person that's devoted years of their life to studying a topic.
And it especially sickens me that this author was dismissed by a "professional" at one of these institutions that was plagiarizing their work. These "professionals" are the same as every other person out there, and the dumb degree really adds nothing.
Nobody cares about your degree.
And yes, I know that there are good professors/researchers out there. But man I'm really sick of these institutions that pretend they hold some higher level of scrutiny to their work. The more I learn about them (and try to replicate the results in their research papers), the more I realize that this whole establishment is rife with shoddy work just like any corporation out there.
From a bystander's perspective (I'm nowhere near a PhD, but have friends who are), I think there's value in learning academic rigor (which is what I think PhD does). I see it like learning to submit a high quality PR into a field of science. You learn to make sure everything you do is well-written, properly backed up, tested, verified, reviewed. There are just way too many ways for humans to come to the wrong conclusions, make unintentional assumptions, or miss alternative explanations. A highly passionate person without academic training is more likely to find themselves falling into these traps. (I'm sure there are notable exceptions). I think with all its flaws, PhD might be the last bastion, in principle, where you're trained to be insanely precise and pedantic. The reality is a lot messier than the ideal, but it's still a valuable pursuit.
I wasn't talking about humanities, I was talking about the general value of PhD in response to the parent. Don't know what exactly they study in humanities, but I guess at least some of it has to be done with high rigor and precision.
The point is that institutions are comprised of peers that validate one's work.
It's the validation that's important - confirmation from (ostensibly) equals that the work is rigorous and original.
In contrast, anyone can go down a delusional rabbit-hole and present it to the world as „truth“, when it's anything but; and then try to pass themselves off as an independent academic. That's just not going to work in Science.
Every system has flaws. That doesn't mean all systems are meaningless. It's easy to point out the flaws in a system; fixing them or proposing a new system with fewer flaws is much, much harder.
> "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"
An academic publication is just a blogpost that got signed off as “not totally wrong” by someone who barely read it. It feels like the biggest supporters of the system are its leeches who produce no value yet benefit from the clout.
> But honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free![22][23]
Yep, remember that? Cooks Source (lack of apostrophe in the original) copied an article about cooking, which lead to the discovery of massive copyright infringement on the part of Judith Griggs, the editor of that now-defunct publication.
So, two things:
One, it looks like Judith Griggs was right. This kind of thing does happen a lot in the academic world.
Two, this kind of thing probably happens a lot in that particular attempt at a journal or book or academic blog or whatever that pathetic excrescence is officially called. Get the copies now before they use copyright claims to make it impossible for people to notice how often they violated copyright.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadThe title is a quote from a professor's assistant insisting that "blogs aren't real scientific publications". The (to me) blatant plagiarism of the blog author seems pretty awful, as does the insistence that the blog is "beneath their notice".
On topic: It seems like the author was directly plagiarized, and it sounds like the perpetrators are handwaving lawyers at them. If I were them, I'd write to the head of their faculty or their dean; I suspect the university wouldn't want to be associated with potential plagiarism (and I suspect their lawyers would recommend getting the citation approved).
The university and the journal. They both have an interest here.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
The "Nobody cares about your blog" statement, in this case, is not a dismissive, if accurate, statement about an anonymous blogger, or low viewership blogs in general.
It's a self-serving excuse written by a person who cares a lot, obviously, because all their images came from the blogger in question's site.
Universities are political organisations before academic ones.
[1]https://www.rose.uzh.ch/de/seminar/wersindwir/mitarbeitende/...
[2] https://philmagness.com/2022/10/kevin-kruses-plagiarism-scan...
[3] https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2022/10/princeton-...
It appears that the entire journal is fraudulent (stock photos for people who apparently work there).
The author of the content that was one of the allegations said:
>Bayor, who Magness had accused Kruse of plagiarizing, has previously told the ‘Prince’ that the accusations against Kruse were “politically motivated” and that “there is not a story here.”
It's from the article.
Merry Christmas :), your blog is fascinating and I’ll read through some of the other posts too!
Everything else reads like classic misdirection of someone caught red-handed.
I think a thorough examination of Rossi's scholarship would be in order.
It’s a shame the article didn’t have a comment directly from Rossi but maybe they tried to get one and failed.
Finding their email addresses is mostly straightforward, it's on their institutional pages most of the time. Note that one of them is deceased since 2021, which does make me wonder how relevant this list is now.
https://fr.receptio.eu/operationalstaff
There's a Noemi, who seems to also moonlight as a stock photography model elsewhere:
https://www.westend61.de/en/imageView/HOXF02297/portrait-hap...
(Some staff pictures might have been swapped by mistake, which... still says something, perhaps?)
The bookshelf behind many of the "staff" appears to be itself from a stock photograph:
https://www.eclectuals.com/literaryservices
The attorney himself might be a stock photo - they might have kept the original Italian description in the ALT tag:
https://www.therrawreport.com/about-2
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/494184_29da2642a38540ef8e...
Who knows what's going on.
> This precipitated a correspondence with Noemi De Santis, who explained "I am Professor Rossi's secretary, who is not aware of our correspondence. I manage her mail account."
I'm surprised a professor would have a secretary handle their correspondence. That does sound like an entitled environment.
I blog because I'm forgetful AF and want a record of how I solved problems in the past to refer to later.
If other people get someone out of it too, that's gravy.
However as with any code I published I would be fairly annoyed were someone to lift it and present it as their own without either first contacting me (which is trivial) or citing me.
I have found a lot of references to things I have done on google scholar et al and I am flattered to have been included.
I don’t understand why anyone would risk being caught out like this. Citing is trivial and indicates you have done research and then built on someone else’s work.
Those mail responses sound like they actually care a lot, maybe not about doing proper work or research, but certainly about getting caught red handed.
What a terrible behaviour.
"The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition."
It's all about how an academic plagiarized from the blog of this person, and then the academic's secretary completely dismissed it with statements such as - "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"
Ironically, a long blog post I wrote in 2015 has over 50 citations (more than most of my papers as an academic, amusingly) according to Google Scholar, so clearly others don't feel the same.
Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?
I would make a BibTeX @misc entry with the author, title, and URL. Similar example without even a URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Qiskit/qiskit/master/Qiski.... Here's how that shows up in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=82533882547072366...
Websites are easy as per that criteria.
The one I find annoying is when people cite like this. According to XYZ [1].... It establishes where the idea comes from, but sometimes lacks details that are needed to reconstruct the idea.
[1] Personal correspondence
It was a paper on a very relevant topic that would really be of interest. It had been cited in a dozen different papers, or so. But I could not find the cited paper anywhere!
I realized I could find the author of the cited paper, and just email them. They said "Oh, that was a conference presentation, it was never published as a paper anywhere, only presented orally at the conference."
Fine. Except... most of these citations didn't cite it as a conference presentation. Most of the citers, I am pretty sure were not at that conference. They just copy and pasted the citation from other papers, thinking the same as me, oh, that seems a useful cite. The first couple times it was cited, it might have actually been cited as a conference presentation at a particular conference on a particular date, but that wound up omitted from future copy pastes.
I don't think this was a particularly unusual occurence. Many citations are... unreliable.
A citation to something with an actual URL is pretty good.
Depends on the publication and the style guide they use. The ones I’m most familiar with are MLA & APA and they both have formats for how they want blogs cited.
I’m not sure how a blog would make the leap into being indexed as part of Google scholar though, unless it was first cited in a more traditional academic paper that fell into their domain.
Google scholar tracks citations by itself in some mysterious way, I have not contributed to that at all.
I understand it would look bad if your publication is citing only few blogs, but in such case the actual problem is that you need find existing publications or books in your area as well. Deciding that you won't cite a blog while you are using it for your work is not a solution to that.
I haven't used google scholar, but is the problem with limited knowledge of the tool that one don't know how to do it? Or is the tool itself limited? This makes me wonder whether the tools which doesn't easily allow one to track citations properly are part of the problem. This was definitely not a problem with bibtex[3]. Either way, that is not an excuse to basically commit an academic fraud.
[1] https://is.muni.cz/predmet/fi/VB000?lang=en [2] https://www.research-integrity.admin.cam.ac.uk/research-inte... [3] https://jonas-moennig.de/how-to-cite-a-website-with-bibtex/
Perhaps the automatic plagiarism detection used (if used) didn’t include blogs in its corpus, so it wasn’t flagged.
But still the author should have known that unattributed copying is word theft.
Both undergrads and postgrads are taught this on week 1. Professional/career academics are expected to abide by this as well.
The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.
It feels a little like a wild west to me.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search_result?query=majid.info...
He can’t be bothered to comment himself but nonetheless has the XKCD “There’s someone wrong on the internet!” complex so I get stuck posting here. I’m safe writing this since he also makes me cherry pick any replies to read back to him, doesn’t do it himself.
All in all I guess it’s not so bad though, better than writing condescending & mild legal threats to bloggers whose work you boss ripped off.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
Nobody cares about the Twitter account perhaps.
As we get into more innovations such as ChatGPT and "AI" Personality, Image (Stable Diffusion), and Music generation (Technically which are somewhat scripts that literally scrape the internet and prior works to smash together "new" derivative Frankensteinian works) we're looking as a grim future of content theft, and the agricultural mining of independent intellectual work, which will mean that individual independent thoughts and works will become worthless the minute they are published online. Eventually, brilliant minds will go quiet, and then suddenly "AI" will begin to falter, and that's when people will know they should have bookmarked your old (now gone private blog)
Which would both avoided the awkwardness (to put it mildly— academic integrity can be fragile… unless it’s a blog you plagiarize? Anyway…) and resulted in a higher quality work by the plagiarist who might have obtained access to more portions &/or higher resolution images.
Placing arrogance as some flavor of pride— the overly proud and prideful of the world are in some circle of a Venn diagram that overlaps significantly with the set of people that make the world a shitty place at times.
Lot of actual academic work happening on Twitter, blogs and sites like MathOverflow.
I can read a research paper right now (and I do read research papers when they're helpful to the situation at hand). I can write an article, make a video, or share some interesting thing I learned in a professional manner without ever submitting it to a journal. I don't need a PhD to pursue learning as much as I can about the field of Computer Science, and I highly doubt a PhD will offer me any significant advantages in this pursuit. Especially after my experience getting a B.S degree (pun fully intended).
I can't wait for the day when we recognize that educational institutions don't actually signify any more authority than a random person that's devoted years of their life to studying a topic.
And it especially sickens me that this author was dismissed by a "professional" at one of these institutions that was plagiarizing their work. These "professionals" are the same as every other person out there, and the dumb degree really adds nothing.
Nobody cares about your degree.
And yes, I know that there are good professors/researchers out there. But man I'm really sick of these institutions that pretend they hold some higher level of scrutiny to their work. The more I learn about them (and try to replicate the results in their research papers), the more I realize that this whole establishment is rife with shoddy work just like any corporation out there.
In theory, yes, you should. In practice - not necessarily.
It's the validation that's important - confirmation from (ostensibly) equals that the work is rigorous and original.
In contrast, anyone can go down a delusional rabbit-hole and present it to the world as „truth“, when it's anything but; and then try to pass themselves off as an independent academic. That's just not going to work in Science.
An academic publication is just a blogpost that got signed off as “not totally wrong” by someone who barely read it. It feels like the biggest supporters of the system are its leeches who produce no value yet benefit from the clout.
> But honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free![22][23]
Yep, remember that? Cooks Source (lack of apostrophe in the original) copied an article about cooking, which lead to the discovery of massive copyright infringement on the part of Judith Griggs, the editor of that now-defunct publication.
So, two things:
One, it looks like Judith Griggs was right. This kind of thing does happen a lot in the academic world.
Two, this kind of thing probably happens a lot in that particular attempt at a journal or book or academic blog or whatever that pathetic excrescence is officially called. Get the copies now before they use copyright claims to make it impossible for people to notice how often they violated copyright.