In June 2019, as a victim of academic misconduct, Ph.D. student Huixiang Chen from University of Florida decided to end his life (full story here). That was the first time I learned about academic misconduct, and such tragedy deeply broke my heart. I felt I needed to do something. I wrote an article to share my feelings and pointed out some ways as starting points to deal with academic misconduct in the end (my article here).
Over a year later, I have to admit that I am very dissapointed. Besides increasing awareness, no fundamental changes have been made. In fact, there is a new article this month (Nov 2020) talking about potential academic misconduct happening right now at ASPLOS's review process written by T. N. Vijaykumar, a professor at Purdue University (article here). In Huixiang's suicide note, he sacrificed his life to warn us and wished for a cleaner academic environment. I am suprised to see people are still misconducting right now. This is not about one research community (Huixiang's community is Computer Architecture that got the most attention), but it is a serious and universal problem that needs urgent action. As I am writing this, there are people suffering from academic misconduct at the very moment: maybe depression, maybe anxiety, or maybe thinking about ending their lives. This could potentially affect you too, because accepting flawed papers means less chance for good papers (your papers :)) that go through the fair game (given the controlled acceptance rate).
So, can we do better than just talking about it?
Professor T. N. Vijaykumar's recent article (that I mentioned above) started from an anonymous email he received reporting academic misconduct. In the very first sentence, it says: "Due to your posts, I think you are the only faculty who is interested in stopping the fraud." I really admire what professor T. N. Vijaykumar did, especially considering his limited available time in a busy academic lifestyle. But, is it fair to pose such a big problem on one single person? This should be a collaborative effort. At least, can we have a place for people to safely report academic misconduct evidence (instead of sending emails to one single person)?
This got me thinking that Github repo might be a good place to collaborate. Since official organization to deal with this issue can take time to form, Github on the other hand is "quick and easy". Everyone can contribute to it with "unofficial information", serving as a starting point to help official organizations to tackle this problem more fundamentally.
This is my rough idea on a whim and I welcome any comments to make it better!
For starters, I imagine three things we can use this repo for.
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Information Gathering. We willl gather information related to academic misconduct as a "Table of Content" to bring awareness to this importance problem.
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Solution Discussing. We will discuss potential solutions and their pros and cons, serving as input for official organizations to consider. We might generate more ideas on things we can do as individuals that go beyond this Github repo.
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Evidence Reporting. We will report evidence on academic misconduct (across all research communities). You can create anonymous Github account to do so if you want to remain anonymous.
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Information Gathering. I have started a list of resources here. Please create a pull request to add more links to the list.
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Solution Discussing. I have created the first Github issue for discussing potential solutions (here). Please use the tag "suggestion" when you create such issue.
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Evidence Reporting. Similar to Solution Discussing, please create a Github issue and use "evidence" tag. If you don't have solid evidence or you don't wish to share in public, but want to bring something into attention, you can use "bug" tag to report potential academic misconduct.
Note: This information can be sensitive, so please consider the unintended consequences carefully. For example, if you have detailed information that points to specific names, please consider using private channels such as contacting conference chairs and journal editors before the information is verified. You're more than welcome to add such evidence into this public repo once it's verified by officials. The closest official channel I can find is from ACM (link).
This is my personal action and all opinions are my own. I'm starting this Github repo to have a central place for everyone to contribute in a "quick and easy" way, and to help offical organizations gather information through Crowdsourcing. For example, the Github issues can serve as a forum to discuss potential solutions. If official channel dedicated to academic misconduct exists, please use that instead of this unofficial repo. Note that all the information in this repo is unofficial, and I am not responsible for the content posted here (e.g., potential false information). In fact, I don't know anything more than anyone else and I'm only building a bridge for collaborative efforts (just like how Github is hosting your code, but it's not responsible for the bugs in your code). I have a busy full-time job and I'm not the "go-to person" for academic misconduct. Please use the Github repo for anything related to make the whole process transparent instead of contacting me personally. Thanks for your understanding.
And here's the hope for a better world ❤️
Yixue Zhao, Nov 26 2020