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Re: (off-topic) self-plagiarism



Dr. Divenyi and colleagues -
 
My name is Doctor Nizami, not Mister Nizami. My 3 degrees from the University of Toronto are on record.
 
The rules that journals apply to submissions, which we are all aware of, are based on a condition which all journals wisely state in their submission policy, that is, that the material has not been submitted for publication in any other peer-review journal, past or present. Sending plagiarized material to a peer-review journal clearly violates that trust and automatically voids any considerations of confidentiality. In the past, there have been well-publicized cases in which overtly plagiarized material was recognized by reviewers and the plagiarism was rightfully made public.
 
Dr. Divenyi suggests that the reviewer can only make the plagiarism evident to the editor, and "share his views with the editorial board and the editor in chief". What are the latter then supposed to do? Ignore an obvious breach of ethics by the plagiarist? Chances are that if the plagiarized paper reviewed by Dr. Toth was in fact published 6 times previously, then someone somewhere probably realized it was fake - and did exactly what Dr. Divenyi suggested, with the result that the paper came right back into circulation. The old-school model supported by Dr. Divenyi doesn't work. As evident from notorious cases in the past, it never did. - Lance Nizami PhD
 
In a message dated 7/7/2009 1:15:27 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, pdivenyi@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Mr. Nizami has obviously misunderstood my earlier posting. All journals
consider any submitted paper confidential and often clearly state that the
reviewer should not divulge the paper's content. Now our colleague Laszlo
Toth has a valid point but he can't tell us who the author is and what the
paper is about. The editor trusted him with the paper and expects him to
make a recommendation as to publish it, reject it, or recommend revision.
Rejection in case of multiple publication is the obvious choice but Laszlo
can't do more than proposing rejection. He can also explain to the editor
his reasons and could ask the editor to share his views with the editorial
board and the editor in chief.

-Pierre Divenyi

On 7/7/09 6:25 PM, "Laszlo Toth" <tothl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Pierre Divenyi wrote:
>
>> I respectfully disagree with Peter. When a journal sends a paper for review,
>> it is often explicitly but always implicitly implied that the paper and its
>> content are confidential.
>
> As I said, I have found the paper in many already-published versions,
> which are clearly public. So its just an additional thing that I have an
> n+1th version which is confidental. I might have found the self-plagiarism
> also accidentaly, just by browsing the web. I think it's not against any
> law if I say: type the following sentence in google and compare the abstracts
> of the
> papers that come up.
>
> "The proposed fast time delay neural networks"
>
>                Laszlo Toth
>         Hungarian Academy of Sciences         *
>   Research Group on Artificial Intelligence   *   "Failure only begins
>      e-mail: tothl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx            *    when you stop trying"
>      http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~tothl        *
>