[WRITING] "Blogs, Papers, Plagiarism and Bitcoin"
Neuroskeptic provides an astonishing example of how some scholars were able to get away very lightly with apparently plagiarizing a blog post about Bitcoin, because it was a blog post.
Retraction Watch reports on a strange case of alleged plagiarism.
In February 2016, F1000Research published a paper called How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science. The authors, Greg Irving and John Holden, demonstrated the use of the bitcoin blockchain as a way of publicly verifying the existence of a certain document at a certain point in time. This approach, they say, could be used to make preregistered research protocols more secure. A problem with preregistration is that it requires a trusted central authority to securely store the protocols. To overcome this, Irving and Holden suggested using the distributed bitcoin network to timestamp documents.
The method involves hashing the document containing the protocol, and then using the hash value as a password (private key) to create a new bitcoin account. By transferring a nominal sum of bitcoins into the new account, a permanent data trail is created, all across the worldwide bitcoin network, which anyone can later use to verify that the hash value was used on the network at that particular time. Because the hash value is unique to a particular document (even a change of one character would totally change the hash), this serves as a tamper-proof way of verifying preregistration.
It’s a clever idea - repurposing the bitcoin network to help make science more rigorous. But it turns out that it wasn’t Irving and Holden’s idea. Back in August 2014, a blogger called Benjamin Gregory Carlisle wrote a post called Proof of prespecified endpoints in medical research with the bitcoin blockchain. In this piece, Carlisle proposed the hash document/create bitcoin account/transfer nominal sum system as a way of verifying preregistration in science. He provided a step by step guide to how to do it. Yet Irving and Holden didn’t cite or acknowledge Carlisle’s post at all. In fact, they implied that the idea was theirs e.g. they wrote that “we propose” the blockchain scheme.
Reading both documents makes it clear that intellectually speaking, the F1000Research paper is very closely based on Carlisle’s blog post. The main difference is that Carlisle simply proposed the idea, while Irving and Holden actually tried it out in practice - but what they tried was 100% Carlisle’s idea. Also, in terms of the text, the paper contained some passages which are strikingly similar to Carlisle’s post.
Much more is at Neuroskeptic.
Retraction Watch reports on a strange case of alleged plagiarism.
In February 2016, F1000Research published a paper called How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science. The authors, Greg Irving and John Holden, demonstrated the use of the bitcoin blockchain as a way of publicly verifying the existence of a certain document at a certain point in time. This approach, they say, could be used to make preregistered research protocols more secure. A problem with preregistration is that it requires a trusted central authority to securely store the protocols. To overcome this, Irving and Holden suggested using the distributed bitcoin network to timestamp documents.
The method involves hashing the document containing the protocol, and then using the hash value as a password (private key) to create a new bitcoin account. By transferring a nominal sum of bitcoins into the new account, a permanent data trail is created, all across the worldwide bitcoin network, which anyone can later use to verify that the hash value was used on the network at that particular time. Because the hash value is unique to a particular document (even a change of one character would totally change the hash), this serves as a tamper-proof way of verifying preregistration.
It’s a clever idea - repurposing the bitcoin network to help make science more rigorous. But it turns out that it wasn’t Irving and Holden’s idea. Back in August 2014, a blogger called Benjamin Gregory Carlisle wrote a post called Proof of prespecified endpoints in medical research with the bitcoin blockchain. In this piece, Carlisle proposed the hash document/create bitcoin account/transfer nominal sum system as a way of verifying preregistration in science. He provided a step by step guide to how to do it. Yet Irving and Holden didn’t cite or acknowledge Carlisle’s post at all. In fact, they implied that the idea was theirs e.g. they wrote that “we propose” the blockchain scheme.
Reading both documents makes it clear that intellectually speaking, the F1000Research paper is very closely based on Carlisle’s blog post. The main difference is that Carlisle simply proposed the idea, while Irving and Holden actually tried it out in practice - but what they tried was 100% Carlisle’s idea. Also, in terms of the text, the paper contained some passages which are strikingly similar to Carlisle’s post.
Much more is at Neuroskeptic.