The year 2013 ended with a nasty surprise for Sander Kersten. As so often, the nutrition researcher googled the protein ANGPTL4, his specialist area. In the search results he found an intriguing article: a mediocre text by one of his former Master’s students with confidential data from Kersten’s lab plus the name of his department. The paper had been published in an open access journal of dubious quality but it gave the impression of being a serious research article. . Amazed, Kersten contacted his former student, a Yemeni who was now living in Malaysia. Kersten: ‘His reaction was one of surprise. According to him, he thought he was allowed to publish the data with a reference to Wageningen. He was apparently unaware that the academic mores don’t allow this.’ But Kersten has doubts about his story. ‘I find it difficult to assess how much of this ignorance he was faking.’
Coming clean
Kersten’s experience is a typical example of a rogue publication in which a researcher, usually a PhD student, publishes something in a scientific journal without the department knowing. In doing this, the offender usually disregards all the rules and moral codes: confidential or incomplete research data are presented shamelessly to jazz up the paper, which also includes the names of supervisors, the science group and the university. Unfortunately, such incidents are no longer that rare. Resource carried out its own survey and found six other Wageningen researchers apart from Kersten who had experienced this.
One of them is Cees Leeuwis, professor of Knowledge, Technology and Innovation. Last December, he discovered that a PhD student had published a background article off his own bat. ‘I would definitely not have given permission,’ he says, ‘because it’s a mediocre article in my opinion.’ In the meantime he has reprimanded the student, who had already returned to his home country of Benin. Leeuwis also plans to take action against the journal. Sometimes students admit to having acted deliberately, as happened to Maarten Jongsma, a senior researcher at Plant Research International who found all kinds of provisional data in a publication by a visiting researcher. When he sent an angry email, the researcher responded by coming clean. He was so sorry, he wrote, but he absolutely had to have a publication before the deadline for his PhD thesis. The consequences if he failed to do this would be immense. The man had deliberately not contacted Jongsma about the publication as he knew he would never give permission for this.
Corruption
Jongsma’s tale touches on one of the causes of this specific type of misconduct: the enormous pressure on students and young researchers from emerging countries. In countries such as China, your chances of getting your PhD and sometimes even your salary depend on the number of publications and their impact. Sander Kersten knows the situation lots of these students are in and has some sympathy for them: ‘Different rules apply when your entire family is dependent on your success as a scientist and you live in a country full of corruption and without a welfare safety net.’ Then behaviour that crosses the line is a constant risk, in his opinion. It is not helped by the fact that the victim, a Wageningen prof, is based thousands of kilometres away and cannot simply turn up on their doorstep.
Another problem is that the rules are not entirely clear for PhD students and are often based on agreements and custom. Data generally belong to the department where they were generated and may only be published with the permission of the group manager. But if there are no sound agreements, the legal ownership position is not so clear. It is possible then that copyright does indeed lie with the person who collected the data. ‘There is a considerable lack of clarity about data ownership anyway,’ says Wouter Gerritsma, information specialist at the WUR library who was once a victim of a rogue publication himself. To prevent any problems, he recommends that researchers ‘make clear agreements beforehand, for God’s sake’. You can do this in writing, but it is best to draw up an official contract. There are rules on the ownership and confidentiality of results in the university collective labour agreement and in standard contracts. Of course, this is no guarantee that everyone will stick to those rules.
Different rules apply when your family is dependent on your success as a scientist
Patents
Scientific journals can play a part in preventing unauthorized publications. The reputable journals do that, says Gerritsma. According to him, scientific journals are becoming ever stricter in their checks. ‘It used to be enough for the corresponding author to guarantee that everyone had approved the content, but now more and more journals want a signature from every individual author, or they inform every researcher in an email. You also increasingly see so-called ‘film credits’ in journals, telling the reader exactly what the contribution was of each author.’ But it still seems to be easy to find a way around this.
In recent years, large numbers of unscrupulous publishers have emerged alongside the established companies, desperate to cash in on the open access revolution. Because it is the author, not the reader, who pays in open access journals, they tend to publish as much as possible of what they get sent. But the consequences can sometimes be considerable. The research that Maarten Jongsma’s student published on was still at an early stage but despite this, he called it a potentially interesting application. This means it is now impossible to apply for a patent as only completely original and unknown work is eligible for a patent. In other cases, the negative consequences seem to be limited because the journals in question are not widely read.
Even so, all the scientists affected are unhappy with the fact that a poor-quality paper is circulating somewhere on the Internet with their name on it. And the researchers have their doubts about whether they will be able to get that article withdrawn. After all, rogue publishers do not seem overly worried about rectifying abuses, and email exchanges usually lead nowhere. Jongsma’s attempt is a good example. After he explained the ethical issues concerning the publication, he got a one-line reply: ‘It is not possible to withdraw any manuscript after publication.’
Illustration: Kito