The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.
This is becoming more popular in another field (non-CS) I follow, but for different reasons:
Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server.
This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think this makes sense anyway. Peer review & editing from journals made a lot more sense in the world where physically publishing, printing & distributing papers made out of atoms was expensive and difficult. And where retractions and corrections were near impossible, and where we didn't have systems for tracking reputation.
More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community.
It won't be perfect, but neither is the current system. And speaking as a mostly independent researcher, the idea of signing over copyright of my work for the privilege of putting my work on their website is preposterous.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the kind of corruption described here.
> More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community.
That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. I think one of the basic functions of peer review is to provide a basic authoritative quality filter to help make the fire-hose manageable. As someone who lacks the infinite time needed to check everything myself, I find those kinds of filters valuable.
> That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review.
Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
> Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
IIRC, the current peer review system was created because academic specialization and the quantity of papers increased mid-century to a point where the pre-WWII system became unworkable. Specialization and volume have continued to increase, and it's hard to see how that makes the old system workable again.
Is it possible to upload to arXiv but have it as private, but have the upload date reserved. Then if something like this happens, you can turn it to public and show that yours was uploaded first. Obviously arXiv itself would need to be a trusted middleman and guarantee that the system isn't being cheated.
Or upload an encrypted version of the file or just a hash of the figure ahead of time? Then release the descrypt key later or when the figure is published, you can point to the hash which was uploaded publicly a long time ago?
This is exactly what we built at https://assembl.net with blockchain timestamping (and it really worked/works)!!! We had many researchers using it but sadly failed to commercialize.
We called it Assembl Chronos. It’s now available here at https://provenance.cerebrum.com. Please give it a try, I’d love to hear your thoughts :)
This would be the ultimate proof, but it would also require the system of justice to care enough to accept the proof. It sounds like they just don't care.
I don't think the system of justice would ever go after that random Chinese scientist, but it may be able to take down the fake arXiv entry, as well as help confirm to journals than your idea came first.
The journal already had documented evidence that the legitimate paper was submitted to the journal before the plagerism was submitted to ArXiv. I don't know why they would trust an ArXiv timestamp more than their own.
