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Comment by rebanevapustus | Hacker News Reader

I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft.

Someone snooped a half-finished draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in a real journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/29/who-are-you-matthew-...

In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both arxiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all.

Anyhow, I highly recommend reading the for better science blog. It's incredible how rampant fraud truly is. This applies to multiple nobel prize winners as well. It's nuts.

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This guy sounds like someone who would be fun for Javier Leiva's PRETEND podcast [0]. You should reach out to Javier.

[0] https://pretendradio.org/

Can you speak more to the “not caring at all” bit? I believe you, but how did you engage them? Did you end up publishing your work eventually?

forbetterscience seems like a good idea, but the writing style, the images, and even the about page gave me pause on if this is a reliable site for trustworthy science commentary

>I believe you, but how did you engage them?

From the article, it seems the engagement came in the form of DMCA take-down requests from university lawyers... which the publication then largely ignored for a considerable period of time (possibly due to counter-DMCA).

In an unrelated scientific field, EE, I recently witnessed how the DMCA process could be used by an "engineer" to silence criticism of his hybrid vehicle battery "upgrades" [2] — similar to Australian company DCS's snafu/lawsuit [1].

Just disgusting, these vultures that know [how to steal/lie/obfuscate] just well-enough to be dangerous... including how to manipulate our DMCA system to their dishonest advantage.

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=_QNMVMlx48E&pp

[2] theautopian.com/toyota-prius-owners-can-soon-swap-tired-old-batteries-for-sodium-ion-cells-but-drama-rages/

He managed to DMCA strike the corrected version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214

We then contacted Stanford, and somehow got their legal team to message Arxiv telling them that Matthew is a fraudster.

In spite (!!) of Arxiv removing his stolen version thanks to Stanford's email: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14810

They refused to lift the obviously spurious DMCA claim on mine.

After almost a year, with an unsurmountable amount of open-source evidence and the thief having had every single paper he has ever written retracted for fraud!! the best the journal did is to add a notice: https://www.mdpi.com/2674-113X/2/3/20

Arxiv cared even less. They allowed the thief to DMCA strike me multiple times. He even managed to take down the real version of the paper by claiming that it was his: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214

> Did you end up publishing your work eventually

No. When I tried to do so, I was actually rejected from a conference because their plagiarism detecting system labelled that I was trying to publish something that already been published (what was stolen).

It was very traumatic.

Huh. Sounds like the research needs to be forked to several different hosting providers, preferably ones not based in the US with its insane DCMA laws.

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