The problems with proposed measures against academic plagiarism

The Parliamentary Committee on Education has proposed changes to the Academic Staff Development Act (ASDA), which broadly aim to achieve two main things:

• Add the possibility of revoking doctoral degrees and dismissing university professors who are found guilty of plagiarism. In case of systematic violations (at least three scientists caught in plagiarism), revoke the university's accreditation for the doctoral program in their field within the program period;
• Introduce national minimum scientometric indicators for holding academic positions.

On paper, both changes aim to introduce higher quality in the scientific community – that professors do not plagiarize and therefore work harder in their career growth. That is the theory behind the changes. In practice, things will probably happen a little differently.

Copying other people's works

There is indeed a loophole in the current regulation that does not allow even proven plagiarized doctoral dissertations to be canceled. Neither the universities nor the ministry can react to a proven case of plagiarism if the person affected (the one from whom it was copied) does not seek their rights themselves. The reality is that those who must seek their rights are often in some kind of dependence and even mutual benefit with the one who copied their work. This of course makes the regulation not work and accordingly there are no people convicted of plagiarism. It is undeniable and imperative that this thing be fixed. The question is how.

The draft amendments to the ZRAS envisage the creation of a ministerial tribunal to which reports of plagiarism would be submitted and which would investigate each case individually. The powers of this tribunal would include revoking doctoral degrees and forcing the university to remove people caught in plagiarism from their academic positions. The idea is that the members of this commission would be independent, objective, uncorrupted and impartial, i.e. it would not be possible for universities to influence their decisions. You can guess how far this would be possible, but in general, the idea of plagiarism being condemned far from the offices of the plagiarists is generally a good one.

And while everything at this stage seems good and well-thought-out, there are inevitably nuances and the possibility of the so-called "Bulgarization" of good ideas. First, what do we understand by plagiarism? If it is a question of copying information from scientific articles in reputable indexed publications without properly placing citations or if it is a question of copying entire passages from foreign doctoral dissertations or monographs that are present in the register of the National Center for Information and Documentation (NACID), then we will have categorical, clear and indisputable rules for assessing a work as "plagiarized". However, if it is allowed to be assessed as plagiarism, for example, the theft of information from student course projects or diploma theses - and this is the most widespread plagiarism - things begin to take on a slightly different color.

Student term papers, projects and even theses are not kept in a national register. Each university has its own internal rules for their storage. The common practice is to simply go to the archive for a certain period of time (they are kept for at least a few years) and nothing more. This is also the reason, as I mentioned above, that the most frequently plagiarized materials are these works that are invisible to the outside world. The only way for such plagiarism to reach the newly created ministerial tribunal is either for the author of the work in question to file a report (as could happen now, but in court), or for someone inside the university to remove the things from the archive and notify the new body.

Here lies the great danger of abuse– given that the record-keeping of the content of course projects and theses is a completely internal university procedure, it can easily be manipulated by key people in the university itself. To put it bluntly – an existing work in the archive can potentially be replaced with a fabricated new one, as a result of which a lecturer who has never actually plagiarized anyone can be fired. All that is needed is for the former student whose name is used for such a scheme to agree to participate in it (and this could easily be a current member of the conspiracy group that is carrying out the fraud). Thus, the plagiarism committee can potentially be used as another “bat” for self-dealing with “inconvenient people”.

In this sense, I highly admire the measure of revoking program accreditation when registering systemic violations. This somewhat limits the power of the potential bludgeon, by limiting the number of people who can be screwed over for a certain period of time. However, there are certainly still many open questions and the situation cannot and should not remain as described above. A well-written law should not contain such loopholes for abuse by, I will use the definition of former Minister Simeon Dyankov, "feudal old men."

What are the possible alternatives? Personally, I see two options:

1. Student dissertations should not be subject to review by the plagiarism committee. This generally means that this committee will be left almost without work, because plagiarism from other people's dissertations and indexed works is generally self-limited (there are currently some blatant examples, but only because they are completely unpunished). That is, the action of the plagiarism committee will be limited and will only work for isolated rare cases, and will not have the preventive effect of the more widespread and more harmful practice - theft of student works;
2. At least the thesis should be subject to regulation and their electronic copies should be deposited in a national register. This way, clerical fraud will not be possible and the professors will be protected from administrative arbitrariness.

It seems to me that neither of the two options will be adopted, and the door will be left open for the use of the plagiarism commission as a club to settle scores with inconvenient people. In some cases, the commission will do good and valuable work for society, but in others it will work in direct favor of the "feudalism" of some universities. The creation of a national registry for student theses will not be received positively by the academic community, and the reason for this is that in many universities the quality of the theses in question is very low.

Scientometric criteria

For now, when filling academic positions, each university has the right to determine the criteria that candidates must meet. Most universities have adopted the practice of setting the criteria for filling academic positions low and relatively easy to meet. That is, someone with a doctoral degree can become an associate professor or even a professor quite quickly… if there is an open competition for one. And this is precisely what is actually the main obstacle to “mass habilitation” – a definition that populists often use in the media (there is talk of “swarming of professors and associate professors” and similar things). Although according to the law, competitions must be open and there must be competition for them, the reality is different – competitions are purposefully made for certain people and most often only one candidate appears (the one who is selected in advance).

The change in the law will in no way change this situation. The reason is that initially it is completely natural for the employer (university) to choose the employee (teacher) to occupy a given position. The idea of competitions is that this should not be the case, but the reality is, and always will be, different. When a new person is hired in a given department, he must be someone who will adequately fit into its team. It is quite normal for people in the department to choose the right candidate not based on "scientometric criteria", but on the basis of their personal biases and acquaintances with him. Such is the world - such is the nature of man. Deputies in the National Assembly are also elected not on the basis of objective indicators of their competence and high morality, but on the basis of subjective public attitudes.

But our legislators still insist that they will be able to change things and change human nature. Scientometric criteria can generally be divided into two main categories:

• What work has the person himself put in: how many scientific publications have they published (and where - an impact factor requirement will be introduced), how many university courses have they developed, how many textbooks have they written, etc.;
• How other scientists evaluate him: how many times he has been cited in other people's scientific works by people who are not directly related to him.

Of the two categories, only the requirement for publication in a journal with an "impact factor" has any real weight and is of practical benefit to the conceived idea. Interestingly, at the moment, most (if not all) universities have a similar requirement in their regulations anyway.

Everything else will actually lead to a deterioration of the general situation. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that the following three extremely vicious practices will be tolerated:

1. The exchange of quotes between two supposedly unrelated scientists on the principle of "me to you, you to me" will be strengthened and expanded;
2. The “ number of publications” will become an even more important criterion for career growth, at the expense of their quality. As I said, an article with an impact factor has it as a requirement at the moment anyway. Increasing the requirement for the remaining “number of articles” will lead to the meaningless publication of (I will allow myself to use this word) nonsense. Only low-quality “scientific” forums, which at this point are used for vacation during the school year, will benefit from this – they will start swallowing even more “rights participation fees” from those publishing in their collections;
3. Scientific articles with long lists of large author teams will begin to prevail. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with teamwork, quite the opposite, but in this case I am alluding to practices in which people are fictitiously recorded as co-authors of publications and textbooks to which they have no personal contribution. When one of "our people" needs a "number of publications and citations" in order to meet the criteria and "make him an associate professor", doctoral students and other colleagues are forced to fictitiously include him as a co-author in their works. This practice has existed, exists, and will continue to exist (how widespread it is depends on the quality of the university), but in this case the increased scientometric criteria in question will exacerbate it significantly.

Ultimately, scientometric criteria will neither change the fact that often "the position opens up for a specific candidate", nor will they change the fact that there is a possibility of people being appointed to academic positions without having sufficient competencies and real scientific contribution for this. It will simply make the process of academic growth more difficult, which I personally believe will not force pseudo-scientists to roll up their sleeves and improve, but will motivate them to strengthen the harmful schemes for academic growth "through the back door" for the system.

It is good to realize that the quality of associate professors and professors at a given university is important only for the prestige of the university itself and no one else. The fact that a higher education institution allows itself to appoint incompetent people to high positions in the long term only harms it itself. The introduction of national scientometric criteria will not stop the academic growth of bad and incompetent people - it will only make it more difficult, which will not affect them the most, but their conscientious colleagues, who will be forced by circumstances to push them away. This will further repel potential doctoral students and quality staff, because the situation in some universities will become even more difficult than it already is.

That is, the national scientometric criteria will not increase quality – in fact, in some places they will decrease it. On paper it will look great and all our associate professors and professors will be great scientists with perfect biographies. But in practice… they will be the same, if not more incompetent.

Ultimately, the upcoming changes to the law aim to increase state regulation and reduce autonomy. And we know very well that beauty cannot be forced. Scientometrics is doomed to failure. The solution is not in counting more and more publications and citations, but in creating strong market competition. The proposed changes do not in any way encourage this much-needed competition between universities.

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