Generative AI |

Retraction of a plagiarised edtech book. The final chapter.

Wed, 22 May 2024 02:36:59 +0000

This is hopefully the last chapter of a series of activities I have started nearly one year ago. I had reported a case of AI-supported plagiarism in a book on learning analytics which has been published in German last year ( ). One of our papers has been plagiarized by a team of authors who have published a . After months of lack of reaction by the Springer and authors from Dublin City University I have reported the status .

Today, I am happy to report that the book is finally retracted and it even has the following retraction message on each chapter:

“The publisher has withdrawn this volume in agreement with the editors. The volume was produced as part of a series of volumes by the publisher providing an AI-based summary and translation of the current state of the art in the field, but this process was not properly stated in the volume itself. Furthermore, the authors of the papers presented in the volume were not properly acknowledged. The editors were not made aware of these problems and have followed the publisher’s policies and guidelines in good faith. The publisher and editors apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

How did this happen? I had finally contact to someone with sense for research integrity at DCU. Their research integrity officer took action and finally the authors have initiated the retraction of the book despite the ignorant statement by Springer that this is not a case of plagiarism. For weeks the book completely disappeared but since yesterday the retraction message is visible. I am quite sure that Springer would have not taken any action, given that there are still several books of the same production logic available ( , , , , , , ). If you look at the editors you might be able to see a pattern.

What can we learn from this? My only take-home message is that we need to develop more awareness about research integrity and the responsibility of each individual author in this process. In times where “content” can be generated by a click, we will see more of this kind of “publications” which in the end diminishes the value of research and researchers. In the same way that large language models have the potential to automate the results of a process of individual discovery, learning and knowledge production. By employing these approaches in our professional context as researchers, we contribute to the further destabilisation of higher education and research.

A plagiarised edtech book and nobody cares

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 06:36:59 +0000

Some of my regular readers might remember that I have reported a case of AI-supported plagiarism in a book on learning analytics which has been published in German last year . One of our papers has been plagiarized by a team of authors who have published a . Here I report about what has happened since I have reported the case.

First of all, I would like to publish the material which I have been using as a basis for my complaint against a. the authors, b. the publisher and c. Dublin City University as affiliated institution of the authors and d. peer researchers whose work has been potentially plagiarized.

The first document is a presentation I have given during an online meeting on 20. July 2023 with Springer Nature representatives. It shows the Springer code of conduct for book authors and uses COPE guidelines to evaluate the plagiarism case and provides examples of text from the book chapter. All parties have received this presentation.

Slides from presentation to Springer Nature on 20. July 2023

In addition, I have provided to all parties a full analysis of the text which has been plagiarized on the book chapter. For this I have retranslated the German text with DeepL and marked to similar text passages.

Full analysis of text similarity from original text and translated text

Next I will summarize how each party has reacted to the case.

Communication with the authors. My initial approach was to contact the editors/authors of the book to see how they are seeing their responsibility and breach of publication ethics. Besides that fact that only one of the authors has seen the need to communicate, the only argument was that it was all a project with Springer and that Springer is responsible for the text that has been produced. There was no awareness that publication ethics are an individual responsibility for researchers. The authors have not taken any action to withdraw or correct any word from the book. Furthermore, some authors have listed the chapters a their original publication in GoogleScholar.
Communication with Springer. I have been talking to Springer Nature and the VP content innovation in an online-meeting. This team has accepted all the things which have gone wrong and they promised to work on that. While they initially offered an erratum, the VP Content Innovation has communicated in an E-Mail to me on 18. September 2023 that a retraction process for this book has been initiated. I had also filed an official complaint via the contact form of Springer Nature about the plagiarism and have never received any reply (not even a confirmation of the request!). Since several months had passed without any action I had contacted the VP again and he informed me in an E-Mail on 13 October 2023 that the case was analysed by “research integrity specialists and I can report that after careful consideration they found that there was not sufficient evidence to support a claim of plagiarism by the editors. There was no misappropriation by the editors of intellectual property used in the machine-generated book and there was no absence of attribution to the originators of intellectual property used in the machine-generated book”. That was the end of the communication and there have not been any changes to the book.
Communication with Dublin City University. On 20 September 2023 I have contact the Vice President for Research at Dublin City University and he promised to address this issue directly. After sending a monthly reminder I have only received excuse E-Mails and my latest request for an update has been ignored. DCU has not documented any action after I have reported the case and I have not received any information about the procedure which they are following.
Communication with peers. After documenting the case I have informed other authors via E-Mail and also marked many on LinkedIn to raise awareness about the case. Nobody of the other authors has reacted or got in contact with me.

What is the conclusion of this? My only conclusion is hat nobody really cares about principles of publication ethics and that all rules related to plagiarism can be streched as it pleases publishers and plagiarists. I am deeply disappointend that also nobody of my colleagues cares for this and I can´t understand why.

AI destroys principles of authorship. A scary case from educational technology publishing.

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 06:36:59 +0000

I have long waited before I share a special case of AI generated publishing in the field of educational technology which needs a public reflection and review. Approximately 3 months ago, I have received a citation alert which made me curious. One of our papers has been cited by a team of authors who have published a . The book has as subtitle “A machine generated overview”. Especially the fact that authors from Ireland have published a book in German and the use of generative AI for the book has made me even more curious.

After an initial reading I was really confused what I am seeing there. First of all, the introduction and much of the text did not really make a lot of sense and the language was not up to scientific standards. Second, I read the part where our paper should have been cited and I was surprised to see that our publication has been somehow mentioned, but that there is no proper citation in the text (but there is one in the references). After reading the text more intensively, which should be a summary of our paper according to the introduction, I had the impression that the text itself is not a summary, but a direct translation of our original publication. This left me really confused and I translated the so-called summary back into English to see that my initial impression was right. A large proportion of text is not summarized but just translated and put into this chapter without quoting the original text. Puzzled by this case of plagiarism I first checked how Springer as a publisher acts in such kinds of cases.

What I found was the of which the following principles where especially important for me:

Principle 1: “The submitted work must not contain any plagiarism and should not have been published elsewhere in any form or language”.
Principle 2: “The work of others should always be properly acknowledged…Clarity should be provided on which text is the Authors’ own and which text has been used from others”.
Principle 3: “A basic rule is that if the Author is not the creator of everything in the manuscript, they must get permission from copyright owners or have a valid license to use their content, unless it is ‘fair use / fair dealing’ or in the ‘public domain’”.

With these principles in mind I contacted the authors regarding the breach of these principles and I was also in touch with Springer regarding this project. The authors argue that they are clearly marked as editors of the book and that the way the book has been produced is even mentioned in the title and that Springer would be responsible for the design of the book. When I look , the editors of the book are also shown as authors. The same applies when I look for . Furthermore, if the editors are not the authors of the chapters, who is then the author?

So an original text of me and my co-authors is resued without proper quotes and citation plus the text is marked as intellectual property of the new authors and even the book is published under a commercial license although our original text has a Creativecommons license. This is a really scary approach to scientific publishing and the potential future of authorship and publishing in the age of AI and a breach of publication principles. The publisher is currently still working on an erratum focusing on the part where our text has been reused, but I feel responsible to share this case with other researchers (especially the ones whose publications have been also mentioned or reused). If this is the future of academic publishing, I am very sure we should stay away from it. What do you think?