When I started climbing the academic ladder beginning in 1960, the cardinal academic sin is plagiarism. After all, publications and your peers’ judgement of them is what an academic lives on and the only worthwhile currency in the profession. Half a century later according to a NPR radio program I was listening to the other night corrupt practices have evolve into many branches that I never heard before. Among many there are:
1. Selling co-authorship – if you have a paper just accepted for publication in a journal but not yet appeared in print, then you can add the name of another scholar as co-author even though s/he has never contributed anything to the content of the paper. For this, you can be paid handsomely by the other party for having his/her name as co-author of the paper.
2. Paying to have a paper published – since scientific publication is often a very stable profitable business, a number of journals have been developed where you can have your paper published by paying a (substantial) fee often disguised as “page charges” . No peer reviews will be required. Such journals are frequently labelled as open source journals
3. Other more limited corrupt practices – often based more on personal relationships and/or biases than regular peer opinions.
During my 46 years on the Harvard faculty I have never heard even hints of the above sins nor aware of there existence. My suspicion is that even today they are only limited to lower-tier universities where reliable peer opinion/reviews are often lacking and corrupt behaviors as listed above are harder to detect. At the top, it is still peer opinion and objective evidence such as citation count that matters.
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