International conference "Plagiarism Detection": does an academic journal need plagiarism checking?

Abstract

This article presents the overview of the Vth and VIth annual International Scientific and Practical Conference "Plagiarism Detection" (hereinafter – the conference; website: ozconf.ru), held October, 2020 and 2021. The main aim of this major professional platform is to create expert environment for discussing plagiarism in the educational and scientific communities in the CIS countries, to inform about the novel text processing technologies, text mining and assessing its originality, as well as to discuss the use electronic resources in education and science to facilitate networking of specialists. The article reviews some definitions and presents examples of unethical behaviour in science, such as plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplication (i.e. multiple publications), fraud and data fabrication. By using such practices some unscrupulous authors assign to themselves the credit of other scientists’ achievements and results, present out-dated results as new, perform data hacking and manipulate research process to obtain an anticipated result. Altogether such practice builds the illusion of promoting the knowledge and publication activity, providing the authors with access to financial support, salary increase, career promotion, bogus authority and standing in the science environment. The article also presents some law aspects concerning the authorship and plagiarism in the Russian academic community, reiterating that plagiarism is a criminal law category and can be regarded as a crime if it causes substantial damage to authors or copyright holders. Revealing errors, typos, plagiarism and other infringements of ethical norms and regulations in works, published by many journals and publishers, is comparable with eroding credibility and authority, as well as necessitating special checks, errata correction and possible retraction of publications. The situation, however, looks different if the victimized scientists consider compensation for the violation of the copyright and property ownership rights. The article lists examples and the main reasons for retracting fraudulent publications. The aim of retraction is to correct the information published, ensuring its validity, rather than to punish the authors. In the Russian research publishing environment publication retraction has been so far rather scarce. Yet globally the practice of retraction is rather widely spread. The article also summarizes the main features distinguishing unethical publishers, focusing on similarities and differences between journal-clones and journal-predators. It is estimated that currently there is information about hundreds of hijacked journals and more than one hundred thousand authors of the publications in journal-clones. The article also presents some information, pertaining to the history of “Antiplagiat” company establishment and its service development, drawing attention to different points of view about the need to use “Antiplagiat” system or other software for checking education and research publications for plagiarism. It is concluded that any search engines are not ideal and cannot substitute humans in crucial decision-making about a publication. Only an expert in the field, who can judge adequately about the exact substantive nature of text duplications and can assess adequately the scale of borrowing, shall make such decisions. Shifting responsibility from a human being to the “Antiplagiat” system by citing the rate of borrowings, provided by the system, is unethical practice as well.