Three comments on ethics.............DMD ________________________________________________________________ Subject: for toplist From: "Claude Schochet" Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 14:38:53 -0500 Re the Ethics statement on the AMS website. I had some involvement in this area and was chair of COPE (Committee on Professional Ethics) for several years. I have no problem with theoretical discussion of ethical issues and would be happy to pitch in. However, when one comes down to practical issues and AMS involvement as an organization, there are a few basics that people should keep in mind. a) It is extraordinarily difficult to draft decent statements on principle (look at how long Moses had to stay on Mt Sinai... ) and they are never complete axiom systems. b) In practice, the AMS has very limited powers. Depending on the situation, there may be nothing that the AMS can do beyond writing nasty letters to administrators or publishing them in the Notices. Also- one bad law suit against the AMS can eat up a significant part of the annual AMS budget. c) The Guidelines were written with an eye towards establishing a standard that might be referred to when a truly awful ethics breech occurred- e.g. a PhD advisor stealing results from a student and then writing poison pen letters of recommendation for the student. Subtle questions such as Bill mentions were way beyond the scope of the document. ___________________________________________________________________ Subject: Response to comment on plagiarism of papers From: "Peter McBURNEY" Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 20:09:44 -0000 > Nicholas Kuhn wrote: > At the next level of `unfortunate events' comes plagarism of papers: I think > last year there was a fairly flamboyant case in PDE's (someone with multiple > papers in Math Review not of his own work). For some years, anyone organizing a European conference in Computer Science could expect to receive bogus registrants, usually from West Africa, hoping to use the conference as a means to get an entry visa to the country of the conference. Since such registrants usually do not wish pay the registration fees, conference organizers are usually unsupportive of their requests for help regarding visas. The latest scam now involves bogus registrants submitting papers to the conference, in the hope that a paper acceptance is sufficient to persuade the conference organizers to support a visa application. Of course, merely submitting a paper is usually not good enough for acceptance, so we are now seeing plagiarism of past accepted papers. So far, only the title and authors have been changed, and so these cases are rather easy to spot. If your conference suddenly attracts multiple submissions from previously unknown West African researchers, as happened to the Dutch AI and Law Society (Jurix) meeting this year, then this may be the reason. Of course, if we are effective in preventing such scams, bogus registrants may well be forced to write original papers good enough to be accepted, and who knows where this might lead! :-) -- Peter McBurney Department of Computer Science University of Liverpool, UK _______________________________________________________________________ Subject: ethics From: Murray Gerstenhaber Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:51:15 -0500 Although I was a member of the original committee that drafted the Guidelines (and the scribe for some of the language), in the following I am speaking only for myself. I agree with Nick Kuhn that there is a distinction between "social" issues in mathematics and "ethical" ones, although sometimes it may be hard to draw the line. If a result is established by difficult means and someone later claims in print to have a method which trivializes it but never in fact publishes the new approach, he or she may be keeping others from reanalyzing the problem. A new approach may lead to new insights not only about the original problem but also about others that might be attacked in a similar way. Does that cross the line from "social" to "ethical"? (Of course, we might assume after long silence that the "trivial" approach wasn't published because it really didn't work I wonder what might have been the case if the margins of Fermat's copy of Diophantus had been larger.) There is, unfortunately, some confusion created by the Secretary's office about the wording of the Guidelines. The original committee draft was adopted, in accordance with strict Society procedures, in the name of the Society, that which presently appears is a rewording adopted only by a council vote. While the main change is only a shuffling of sentences we now have two versions: the original speaking with the full voice of the Society and the Council's redaction. I have not been informed as to whether any steps are being taken to straighten out this confusion.