Who will protect the rights of scientists?

On April 1, the Higher Attestation Commission will consider an application for the deprivation of the degree of the Commissioner for Human Rights in Mari El

On Wednesday, April 1, the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission will consider the application for the deprivation of the academic degree of Irina Tatarinova, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Republic of Mari El.

The authors of the complaint are scientists Vladimir Navodnov and Galina Motova. They themselves found in the dissertation of the local ombudsman (“Pedagogical foundations of public-state accreditation of modern universities”, 2012) passages that literally coincide with their works.

“When a work is being prepared for defense, a person actively speaks at conferences, goes to seminars, and publishes,” says Galina Motova. - But Tatarinova did not perform anywhere, did not shine. And suddenly congratulations on the defense appear at our university.

“Then only the abstract was available,” adds Vladimir Navodnov. — Only two years later, after repeated appeals to the Russian State Library, we were able to look at the dissertation. We have been working in the field of state accreditation for 20 years and are aware of all significant works.

Therefore, when we saw a text that we read somewhere, and then realized that we wrote it, it shocked us.

In September 2014, Navodnov and Motova filed a complaint with the Ministry of Education and Science. The complaint was sent to the dissolution council, where Tatarinova defended herself, and he, as Vladimir Navodnov puts it, "could not rise above his own ego." The complaint was dismissed in December.

“We never got involved with such procedures and naively believed that if two works are similar, like twin brothers, then everything is obvious,” the scientists say. “But in the conclusion of the dissenting council, black became white, and white became black.

The scientists wrote a letter to the Dissernet community asking them to analyze Tatarinova's work.

“They answered us very quickly that the dissertation really raises serious doubts,” they recall.

In addition to the coincidences with the thesis of Galina Motova and the textbook on accreditation of higher educational institutions, co-authored by Motova and Navodnov, the Dissernet experts found borrowings from five more sources. In total, almost 100 out of 113 content pages, according to Dissernet, are partially or completely written off.

Galina Motova suggests that Irina Tatarinova could have taken the materials used in her dissertation from the local network of the Federal Accreditation Agency in Yoshkar-Ola, where Navodnov and Motova worked until 2009, when Tatarinova headed it.

After the negative decision of the dissenting council, the authors of the complaint are not sure of an objective trial in the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission on Pedagogy and Psychology.

“I looked who is on this expert council,” Galina Motova told Novaya Gazeta on the eve of the meeting. - I was horrified by the fact that out of 47 members, eight people are directly related to the dissolution council, where Tatarinova defended her dissertation. It would probably be right that these eight people could not vote, because this is a conflict of interest.

It should be noted that cases when it is not Dissernet, but the copyright holders themselves who file complaints against plagiarists with the Ministry of Education or the court, are very rare. There are only three such cases.

For example, for several years now, Professor Zufar Salikhov has been trying to appeal against the issuance of a doctoral degree to the dissertation student Elena Abramova. Salikhov found in her work incorrect, in his opinion, borrowings from the works of his students, as well as a patent that belongs to Salikhov and co-authors. The WAC dismissed his complaint.

Another professor, German Mansurov, unsuccessfully demands from the VAK to deprive Khudainazar Yunusov, dean of the Faculty of Biology and Chemistry at Moscow Regional State University, from his doctorate. Dissernet found almost 60 pages of verbatim matches in Yunusov's work with the text of Mansurov's dissertation.

Only Associate Professor of St. Petersburg State University Nikolai Rogulin was lucky. He filed a lawsuit against the former vice-rector of the Polar Academy, Sergei Litvinenko, and the court in December 2014 found that Litvinenko's dissertation was a plagiarism of Rogulin's work.

Litvinenko was ordered to pay 200,000 rubles for copyright infringement and 50,000 for moral damages. True, Litvinenko's doctoral degree was not taken away - the court does not have such powers.

Why are the authors of stolen works in no hurry to complain?

“People who go to such a forgery try to put a straw. Either they will pay the person who writes to them, or, on the contrary, some research worker, wanting to please the official, will offer his help. That is, usually this is a mutual agreement, and the author will never go to complain, - says Galina Motova. She claims that she has already faced the consequences of incorrect borrowing from her dissertation.

“Recently, I was an opponent at the defense of my doctoral dissertation,” says Motova. - The work is good, but I drew attention to one quote. From my work. And the link is to Tatarinova's dissertation. The candidate explained that he refers to her work because it is "more recent".

- Freeloaders need to say a hard "no", - Vladimir Navodnov is sure. “We don’t have to wait for the state to drop everything and start doing it. The society itself should get rid of crooks. This is especially true for teachers. What can a person who steals teach? If it is still possible to turn a blind eye to plagiarism officials, then it is by no means impossible to turn a blind eye to teachers.

Irina Tatarinova told Novaya Gazeta that she did not agree with the claims of scientists, and that the coincidences in the texts were a consequence of the commonality of the topic. She sees the reason for dissatisfaction in the fact that Navodnov and Motova "were forced to resign" from the Federal Accreditation Agency when she was appointed director, "therefore claims were expected."

At the same time, Tatarinova assured that she had no reason not to trust the VAK experts and that she would agree with any of their decisions.