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Academic Papers Yanked After Authors Found To Have Used Unlicensed Software (theregister.com) 74

Posted by msmash from the stranger-than-fiction dept.
An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software. The Register: Elsevier's Ain Shams Engineering Journal withdrew two papers exploring dam failures after complaints from Flow Science, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based maker of a computational fluid dynamics application called FLOW-3D.

"Following an editorial investigation as a result of a complaint from the software distributor, the authors admitted that the use of professional software, FLOW-3D program for the results published in the article, was made without a license from the developer," a note from the journal's editor-in-chief explains.

"One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any intellectual property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner."

Academic Papers Yanked After Authors Found To Have Used Unlicensed Software More | Reply

Academic Papers Yanked After Authors Found To Have Used Unlicensed Software

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  • It's a breach of professional ethics, no?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      This doesn't make the researcher's conclusions wrong, but rather casts doubt into their professional ethics.

      Often it's just sloppy book-keeping, and it shouldn't be the job of engineers and scientists to monitor software licenses; cheaper clerks and admins can do that. Hanlon's razor.

      If no fault is found, hopefully they'd be allowed to back-pay the licensing fees, publicly apologize, and then be allowed to finally publish the research.

      • "This doesn't make the researchers' conclusion wrong..."

        • Based on the scapegoating and us vs them blaming from academics, shouldn't academic papers be accepted / rejected based on the author's and the author's university or research center's ESG score?

          Too much coal industry research grants, too much oil industry research grants, too much big agricultural research grants, too much ...

          • Let's rate universities, colleges, research organizations, think tanks, NGOs, nonprofits with an ESG score where the S as in Social includes

            - where their funding comes from
            - what business their donors or funding comes from
            - what business their founders made their money in
            - what corporate, nonprofit or government agency their faculty or administrators is involved in, or held past jobs or consulting positions with
            - how much of their monetary endowment is invested in poor ESG score investments
            - ...

            Essentially,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        cheaper clerks and admins can do that.

        Oh if that were true. Not the looking after clerical stuff, the being cheaper.

      • Maybe knowledge is a better ethic than money... but then, perhaps they should be publishing open access instead of with Elsevier.

    • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)

      by buss_error ( 142273 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:58PM (#64946427) Homepage Journal

      Mononymous writes:

      It's a breach of professional ethics, no?

      Yes, however, my considered opinion is Elsevier is more concerned about their monopoly rents cartel than anything else. They are paying lip service to "ethics" in the name of their own rapine [techdirt.com] of [techdirt.com] tax payer funded [techdirt.com] research. [techdirt.com]

      Elsevier, again in my opinion, is the spirtual sib of Disney and TicketBastard with none of the cuddly cuteness of Hannable Lecter or Genghis Khan, nor the insightful intelligence of Daffy Duck or Goofy.

      • Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)

        by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:14PM (#64946475)

        Mononymous writes:

        It's a breach of professional ethics, no?

        Yes, however, my considered opinion is Elsevier is more concerned about their monopoly rents cartel than anything else. They are paying lip service to "ethics" in the name of their own rapine [techdirt.com] of [techdirt.com] tax payer funded [techdirt.com] research. [techdirt.com]

        Elsevier, again in my opinion, is the spirtual sib of Disney and TicketBastard with none of the cuddly cuteness of Hannable Lecter or Genghis Khan, nor the insightful intelligence of Daffy Duck or Goofy.

        Take it back. No one should sully Daffy Duck's good name by associating it with Goofy! YOU BASTARD!

      • Actually, if you want a cartoon character that displays true genius, you need to look no further than Dudley Do-Right.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          In the 1990s at work, I found myself in front of my first OpenVMS machine along with a fresh college grad as we tried to figure it out. To save a file, you had to enter the file name, then press the "Do" button followed by the "Write" button (or something similar). I told him to name our test file "Dudley", but unfortunately he was too young to receive my comedy gem.

    • Considering they likely pirated their text books... should we take away their degrees?

    • Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @07:31PM (#64946811)

      Not really. The legitimacy of intellectual property is debatable and therefore so is the ethics of recognizing and respecting it.

    • This makes no sense as Flow Science offers free 4-month licenses for FLOW-3D for the purpose of academic research. Applications require a research proposal. If accepted, a license for the software that best fits the applicant’s field of research will be issued. https://www.flow3d.com/academi... [flow3d.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sosume ( 680416 )

      Noone cares about your ethics if the findings are significant. It's not like they were experimenting on humans. File a lawsuit for copyright infringement but leave the science result alone. "A breach of professional ethics" is such a nice example of petty gaslighting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      Here's an interesting flip side: if the software publisher provided the software for free to the researchers, and the authors didn't disclose that in the paper, would that also be a breach of professional ethics?

      (I'm not saying you're wrong, nor taking a side in this particular case. I just think the counterexample is an interesting thought experiment.)

  • Elsevier has a small conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) <davecb@spamcop.net> on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:43PM (#64946377) Homepage Journal

    Elsevier are very susceptible to losing money through copyright breaches, and so put requirements on their authors' payment of other companies' licencing fees.

    In principle, a publisher worries about false statements or the use of error-prone LLMs. Either of those lower the quality of the articles and reflect to the journal's discredit.

    In this case they did an add-on, for the benefit of their bothers in industry. Not illegal, but definitely self-dealing.

  • So the science doesn't matter (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:45PM (#64946385)

    All that matters is that someone makes money
    Not surprising

    • One of the key tenants of modern science is ethical obligations, that includes not breaching IP or other rights. Their actions are not an example of good science.

  • Do you ignore the science and discourage unethical behavior, or do you ignore the unethical behavior because of the science?

    I think it comes down to judgement calls - how valuable is the science, how great is the ethical breach? Can the breach be corrected or an alternative punishment administered that will act as a suitable deterrent?

    A blanket rule enforced without thought is not the optimal solution.

    • You have to enforce ethical breaches -100% of the time. If it is curable, great: resubmit. If someone else wants to replicate the work (minus the ethics breach) and submit their own paper the science can live on without the original scientists getting the credit. Too bad, so sad. The science will go on.

      We cannot accept breach of ethics. It is a slippery slope that leads to... Dr Mengele.

    • If the science is important, even just to the authors, they can buy a license for the software and redo the calculations the software was doing and republish the paper with the corrected (though identical) figures.

      I think it is both sad, and pathetic, that so many people who are against copyright come down against academic ethics, even while claiming to be really super-scienceriffic people.

      Ethics isn't about each person agreeing with each point, it's about having a system of agreed rules and following them.

      • >Science is about consensus. There is no objective standard of proof, it's all consensus.

        Proof in science is a repeatable results that match predictions better than the predictions of any other existing model.

        Whether that proof is accepted or not, that's humans. If consensus was science, it would be indistinguishable from faith and we wouldn't have lightning rods or medicine.

  • It's a shame (Score:3)

    by kamakazi ( 74641 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:55PM (#64946411)

    In the flood of bogus and faked papers flooding many journals these guys (who have not been implicated in any bad science) couldn't bother to buy the tools they used.
    Yeah, this is pricey Fluid Dynamics modeling software, but if that is the software needed to do the job, then funding to buy the software is just another piece of the funding you need to obtain to do your research.
    Interestingly, Flow-3D offers free licenses for academic research, I am not sure how stringent the application process is, but even without that licensing appears to be in the single digit thousands per year, which is a heck of a lot cheaper than a lot of technical software.
    Not sure who these guys were, or how brilliant their science is, but they definitely need to get someone to track the nuts and bolts of their operation and do some basic asset tracking.

  • Put it on Sci-Hub (Score:5, Funny)

    by parityshrimp ( 6342140 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:03PM (#64946443)

    Sci-Hub will publish it, and they won't even charge for access.

  • Why punish the researchers? It's the software developer's job to give their software a license, nobody else can pick a license for it.

  • Elsevier must die (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:41PM (#64946555)

    Academic publishers shouldn't be copyrighting submitted papers, which just summarize research in progress. Journals were once the only way that researchers could publish their work, but now taht open-source servers can do this so much more efficiently, journals and their proprietary rules can go to the hell they deserve.

  • Different conclusions? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Snert32 ( 10404345 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:51PM (#64946575)
    I wonder if using licensed software would arrive at different conclusions that using unlicensed software? Can they re-publish after buying a license, or do they have to re-research it? Granted, the developers of the software deserves some financial credit for their work, but they should deal directly with the users for that and the academic publications should not be involved. If a publication requirement is to use only licensed software, it's a valid reason to withdraw the publication, but this sounds a lot more like the kids playground: "I'm gonna tell your mommy you did something bad!"

    • If a publication requirement is to use only licensed software

      A publication requirement is to follow ethics guidelines regardless of the outcomes of science. Sure that's a sliding scale between human experimentation on convicts and using unlicensed software, but it is a basic ethics issue none the less.

      A lot of science gets black listed due to ethics issues not directly related to the core research. This is one such example.

  • Proud pirate use of commercial software. Seen it. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:55PM (#64946585)
    A certain blue, three letter, former employer I had back in the early 2Ks was running a bunch of hosted data centers. They and some of the sysadmin clowns I worked with at the time were always viciously attacking Linux, OpenSSH, *BSD, or anything else that was free and obviously superior to the commercial garbage they'd been used to. Amusingly, many of our customers didn't run AIX, they ran Solaris. Neither Solaris (8) or AIX (4.3) at the time. Customers were starting to clue-into using Secure Shell rather than telnet or other older stuff like BSD r* services.

    Well, they give me a build for 1200 Solaris instances for a top-3 US banking customer. In the build instructions it tells me to install F-Secure's version of SSH. I was like "da fuq?" since OpenSSH was free and I had already built and tested Solaris packages for it. Nonetheless, I get talked down to by the other sysadmins and the sales guys "Don't install that fucking freeware garbage. Do as your told for once." So, I slink off and scratch my head for a second at the build instructions. They had only once license! I thought "maybe it's a site license". So, I simply called F-Secure and asked. I got the account rep for our megacorporation and they were very eager to tell me that they'd only given one test/dev free license to the very same sales asshole who told me to STFU and install F-Secure.

    So, after being hazed for questioning anything, I was a bit pissed. I happened to know a guy on our legal team (lawyer) and I went to him and told him what was going on. I remember saying "I don't want to be XXX's pirate monkey bitch." He was absolutely horrified and got his boss from back East on the phone. When this guy heard my story he want absolutely ballistic. He told me to loop him into ALL the work being done for this bank and narc off anyone pulling anything else like that. He also asked for all my communication with F-Secure. Once I'd sent it, he had me sign an affadavit attesting to what I'd been asked to do verbally and in writing by various folks. About five days after I'd turned all that over, I get called into my (worthless idiot) boss's office. He was pretty angry that I'd narc'd off the sales guy (a golfing buddy of his). I was suspicious and I recorded the conversation (one party state). I told him that bragging how much you can do with stolen software is like drag racing in a stolen car. Sure, it's fast, but it's not fucking yours! Then I turned that recording over to legal, too.

    At the seven day mark three people got fired for this bullshit and I wasn't one of them. I almost got fired for dropping by the sales guy's office and asking him if he needed any help carrying out his boxes of stuffed animals and toy cars.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

      That's awesome. I'm glad the legal and other higher ups supported you and did the right thing.

      Even at my tiniest shit hole startup I always made sure we either bought the right number of licenses or used something free. Management never once told me to do something illegal or unethical. They just added it to the budget.

      And really, wtf were those guys thinking being at a fucking huge 3 letter Big Blue company and not just buying a site license? Stupids deserved to be canned.

    • That's one of the best stories I've heard.
    • Thinking back, did your SSH vendor have the heartbleed issue? Or SFTP? One expert admin I knew always hand compiled everything, and removed crud protocols and fallbacks that were never an option. And set intrusion alarms for those to get a 'feel''. And chained comms with another protocol like SNA to frustrate mangled packets. Lost a big DOD contract because they did not believe there were 'no intrusions'. Best fun I had was salting third party MS registry values with millions of licence's for some lame ven

      • Thinking back, did your SSH vendor have the heartbleed issue? Or SFTP?

        Well, remember, heartbleed was an SSL issue, not SSH, despite the fact that modern OpenSSH does link against an SSL library (OpenSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, or BoringSSL are all options as well as no SSL library and internal crypto support only). Heartbleed didn't impact OpenSSH or F-Secure as far as I'm aware despite the linkage.

        SFTP actually wasn't invented, yet. It came out with OpenSSH 2.5.0 in 2001. This incident was actually in 1999. Before that, OpenSSH just used a simple 'scp' protocol which was much

    • Great story, but reading to the end what I wanted to know was what happened next; did they buy the licenses, or go with OpenSSH?!?

      In the late 90s I was working for a small chess server, and they insisted on using commercial SSH just because they hated open source and were shitty businesspeople who didn't know that dollars are important. Eventually they ran out of money and offered to pay me in stock, which I declined. When they suggested they didn't have the money to pay me, I suggested I get a lien on thei

      • I often find open-source haters are pirates of commercial alternatives. They are also usually very loud about how much better they like their stolen warez.

        What happened? My employer was very concerned that we not "impact" the customer by hinting at any of this crapola going on. That's probably because they'd have considered suing the pants off of us for mishandling them so badly. After my boss was dribbled off campus, I asked the new interim manager if he knew why our old boss got drop kicked with extrem

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Thank You! Rock Stupid Boats!

  • The paper should have been yanked for using proprietary, non-open software, that can not be audited or reviewed. I say sagemath instead of mathematica!
  • How many papers do you think were created on computers running an unlicensed copy of Windows or Microsoft Office? A lot of computers have BIOS that violates someoneâ(TM)s IP.

  • If you don't want people using *your* work without proper attribution maybe don't do it to other people either.

  • The paper is still available, it just has a giant diagonal red "RETRACTED" stamped across the pages of the article -- this is not the usual definition of retracted.

    • Interesting aspect.

      I wonder if the discredit can have dire secondary consequences of a failing dam because this paper now is considered not trustworthy.

    • Of course it is within the usual definition of retracted.

      The traditional definition of retracted is that it is still printed in all the physical copies, since there was a single printing run, but somewhere else there is a list of retracted papers/articles that lists it as not being vouched for anymore.

      For example a newspaper would print a short thing somewhere that said, "The article titled BIGFOOT CAUGHT COMMITTING CRIME SPREE WITH BATBOY in the Monday edition is hereby retracted." In a scientific journal

  • "a complaint from the software distributor" how the heck did the software developer know that the software wasn't licensed... the researchers could have just as easily used a colleagues licensed system...
    papers often take years to retract... written with false/fudged data, after multiple independent people confirm the data has been fudged... but a call from a software dev shop gets two papers investigated, and pulled in a heart beat.

    Those ethical considerations are really unbiased. /s

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