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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I've had R01 proposals turned down, then seen the same proposal, lightly reworded, submitted by a person who was on my study section, the next year, get funded.

that's when I knew it was time to get out of academia.

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I saw a version of that with one of my proposals. I found out from a job ad. for the postdoc to do the work - the really unfortunate part was that they had dropped in a drag bag of concepts from a field they didn't understand, creating an impossible project, and shortened the time frame to 12 months from 3 years.

& I was enlightened.

I had a rejected journal submission show up again as a keynote conference presentation a couple of years later. To be fair, with that sort of thing we could have just had the exact same ideas and so forth, but it wasn't a common research topic, and there were suggestive dots easy enough to connect. Regardless, it raised all sorts of alarms about what might have actually happened, and I started thinking seriously about the value of non-peer-reviewed, completely open publishing just as a way of maintaining authorship credit. Even if everything were totally innocent, it was a bit unnerving about the attribution of ideas and everything.

I'm having major conflicts about academics as a career. It seems to get more and more insane every day.

So proof of original authorship is a big issue in academia? You could easily create timestamped proof of having created a particular document, so is the issue more an insitutional one? Pardon me if I make sense, I'm a complete outsider to this.

That would rely on everybody creating timestamped proof, otherwise you could claim ownership of any paper that hasn't been timestamped by timestamping it yourself.

Not all cases are clear-cut, especially where a plagiariser restructures the document, changes the wording, sources, etc..

So I don't think this is a problem that can be solved practically, or even theoretically. But there are certainly things that can be done to better counter plagiarism.

You could post a hash of the paper to a trusted host like Twitter at the point you submit it, and you could then refer to that for proof of authorship and priority at a future date.

You could, however what happens if an author does not post a hash? If I found someone else's paper without a hash, I could generate a hash of my own and claim authorship.

This idea would only work if everybody started securing some form of proof of authorship before sharing papers with anyone, which I don't quite see happening.

Happens with government proposals also. I was told about a school who had it happen to them in the 90's. A Senator was informed and instead of raising all sorts of hell, the Senator basically received assurance the the school would score well on a lot of future grant proposals.

Governments are made of fallible people after all.

That's pretty audacious. Did you confront them?

no, b/c they were pretty senior scientists and I was just getting my career started. I think that would have been career suicide.

Seems rather simple to build checks and balances to prevent this so the question becomes is this a bug or a feature?

This may have happened, but this is not typical behavior in science, and is hardly evidence that people should 'get out of academia'.

It's not typical, but it's not particularly atypical either. Science is one of those fields where (especially now with the publish or perish mentality) YMMV greatly. Good labs are awesome, bad labs can break you, similar to most other human endeavors. Unfortunately, I tend to be more swayed towards believing that bad labs are more common nowadays than in the past.

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