Rooter on the march, or Let's finish all the plagiarism

On April 4 , 2013, as part of the “Public Lectures “Polit.ru””, the celebration of the 5th anniversary of the newspaper of scientists and scientific journalists “Troitsky Option - Science” took place. Unexpectedly for the organizers, the Minister of Education and Science Dmitry Livanov turned up at the evening.

Bioinformatician, Deputy TrV-Nauka editor-in-chief Mikhail Gelfand “came on stage” wearing a red Santa Claus cap. “Please note that there are five stars here, and this will be directly related to the stated topic. Because lately I’ve been feeling like Parsley... It’s Parsley, not Santa Claus. I’ll take it off later, otherwise it’ll be hot.”

Video recording of the evening (made by colleagues from Polit.ru):

“The problem of fake dissertations was recognized quite a long time ago, not this fall, and at various levels,” Gelfand emphasized. He recalled that earlier there had been attempts to reform something within the Higher Attestation Commission, there were attempts to introduce business administration degrees in order to divert the wave of dissertations in the social sciences defended by officials into a different direction. Readers of TrV-Nauka also remember the story with chemist Olga Kazheva; the newspaper later had to sue her in the Noginsk City Court, and TrV-Nauka won this case.

“And then suddenly it burst. …There is a classic story about how a Dutch boy closed a hole in a dam with his finger and saved the whole country, but here the story is directly perpendicular. A little boy found matches and burned down... an entire factory,” he said to the laughter of the audience. “Don’t make me laugh, otherwise I won’t be able to speak!”

And then he recalled how the story developed with the dissertation of Andrei Andriyanov, a “minor political figure at Moscow State University,” a chemist by training, who suddenly defended his dissertation on history. Analyzing the Andriyanov case, Mikhail Gelfand tried to understand why an isolated case suddenly, over the course of a few days in October 2012, grew into a huge scandal with institutional consequences. “How does this story differ from the previous ones, why didn’t it work out before, but now it worked out, why didn’t the gears stick together the previous times? ...I think that, unlike previous situations, there has now really been a political will to deal with this properly...”

Regarding what to do next, Mikhail noted that the idea that we will now establish new, good criteria for dissertation councils, clean out the bad councils and everything will be wonderful seems naive to him. Gelfand believes that “apparently, we need to rely on what has shown its effectiveness, on the scientific community.” “The main thing, as it seems to me, the Higher Attestation Commission should do is to consider appeals,” he noted. Moreover, appeals must be considered properly, and a specific answer must be given to all critical remarks: “there is no borrowing, it seemed to you,” “there is borrowing, but five pages does not count,” etc. “This, apparently, can be ensured by strict regulations for the consideration of appeals,” said Mikhail Gelfand.

He concluded his speech with a story about how they tried to accuse him of plagiarism through the Vremya program on Channel One and a publication in MK. Gelfand was ready to sign autographs on this “boyan” from “MK,” but it seems that no one in the audience had the ill-fated article.

Then ITEP physicist Andrei Rostovtsev spoke about how the fight against false dissertations works in Germany, in particular with the help of the VroniPlag system. He noted that this is a completely volunteer project, which is open to the participation of anonymous users, there is fundamentally no possibility of bribery and there is a double independent verification of documents. Perhaps a similar system can be set up here too.

And then there was an energetic report by astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of TrV-Nauka Boris Stern about the beginning of the Universe. But you can’t tell about him in a short report.

Wait for a detailed story about the evening on our website and on the website www.polit.ru (in the “Lectures” section).

See also: Report “How to defeat bullshit factories” on Polit.ru