[Tccc] Plethora of open access journals and an amazingly brazen example of plagiarism in one of them
James P.G. Sterbenz
jpgs
Fri Nov 18 21:17:03 EST 2011
Apologies in advance for the length of this, but I thought it important post full details.
As we keep seeing CFPs from more and more open access journals led by people we've never heard of, I've been tempted to bring the subject up here.
I'm very much in favour of open access, and along the lines of the recent discussions I think that there are three ways to do this:
1. Pressure traditional societies like the IEEE and ACM and for-profit publishers like Springer and Elsevier to further open up. My university
just signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
2. Convince our funding agencies to require this along the lines of the NIH. Along these lines there is a
Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly
Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research
http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28623/request-for-information-public-access-to-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications-resulting-from
3. We do it ourselves and move as editorial boards to create new *legitimate* open access journals. Some academic communities are doing this.
(For the record while I support the sprit of the petition that has been discussed, I do not support the means of not volunteering to review in venues to which you submit.)
Which gets to the trigger for this email. One of my PhD students discovered that our paper:
"Performance Analysis of the AeroTP Transport Protocol for Highly-Dynamic Airborne Telemetry Networks"
Kamakshi Sirisha Pathapati, Nguy?n Ng?c Tr?c Anh, Justin P. Rohrer, and James P.G. Sterbenz,
International Telemetering Conference (ITC) Oct. 2011
https://wiki.ittc.ku.edu/resilinets/ResiliNets_Publications#.E2.80.9CPerformance_Analysis_of_the_AeroTP_Transport_Protocol_for_Highly-Dynamic_Airborne_Telemetry_Networks.E2.80.9D
(an abstract-reviewed conference in which we publish a number of student papers because our DoD funding sponsors are heavily involved; we put our copy online this summer after DoD clearance)
has appeared as
"Experimental Evaluation of AeroTP Protocol for Airborne Telemetry Networks"
Arun Prasath Siva Thanu Pillai
IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security
Volume 11, issue 9
http://ijcsns.org/
This journal has a stunningly fast turnaround time; the notation at the bottom of the paper indicates that it was received 5 Sep., revised 20 Sep, and apparently online 30 Sep. I guess this is possible if there is no review. Except for the title (in part stolen from another one of our papers at the same conference) the paper appears *identical* except for the plethora of OCR transcription errors. The authors even kept the language talking about the previous work while still referencing our own papers and left the acknowledgements to my DoD contract. The scanned figures are pretty unreadable. Even a cursory examination by a human should have raised suspicion. In this case after a bit of searching on the Web I believe the author is applying to graduate schools in the US, and the motivation must have been fill up the CV.
This leads to the question: Is IJCSNS a complete scam? The Web site indicates an address of Dae-Sang Office 301, Sangdo 5 dong 509-1, Dongjack Gu, Seoul 156-743, Korea. Do any of my Korean colleagues know about them? There is only one contact email for IJCSNS, but there are affiliations of the editors, so I will next try to track them down and attempt to contact them.
Are all of these new open access journals popping up intended as a way for people to load their CVs with journal publications? What institutions would be naive enough to not realise they are bogus? It appears that we've got an increasing problem, and we probably all need to be vigilant on what is going on. In this case, the plagiarised paper is already in Google Scholar, so I'll have to see if there is a manual takedown process there, as well as DBLP, MS Academic Search, Citeseer, etc.
Sigh.
James
---------------------------------------------------------------------
James P.G. Sterbenz jpgs@{ittc|eecs}.ku.edu jpgs at comp.lancs.ac.uk
www.ittc.ku.edu/~jpgs 154 Nichols ITTC|EECS InfoLab21 Lancaster U
+1 508 944 3067 The University of Kansas jpgs at tik.ee.ethz.ch
jpgs@{acm|ieee|comsoc|computer|m.ieice}.org jpgsterbenz at gmail.com
gplus.to/jpgs www.facebook.com/jpgsterbenz google|skype:jpgsterbenz
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