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Originally Posted by bonsaial1
I would be eager to hear Carl's take on this matter. He has been a proponet for scoundrels that plagiarize to be publicly stoned as well as those that use the abreviation for the word Japanese.
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Hi Al,
I don't know quite why you are drawing me into this and I certainly don't know what more I could do to make my position clear. I told Will quite adamantly that he had indeed committed plagiarism, and I believe that I was instrumental in helping Will understand that the charges were well-founded. I wrote Matt to let him know that I agreed with his assessment. I posted Will's apology to this thread. I wrote elsewhere in this thread that the publications involved need to post a correction.
But in case there is any uncertainty remaining:
Will plagiarized. He should apologize publically to all involved (I believe that he has done so already). The involved publications should post a notice and apology.
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I would think that someone with Carl's integrity and founding name on a website would make a public apoligy and remove the plagierized article from the website. I know it is still there I looked at it lastnight.
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First, the article is posted at the Knowledge of Bonsai project, over which I have no control -- not at the Art of Bonsai project, of which I am a founder. So you seem to have my role confused. I couldn't remove it from that site if I wanted to.
There is a second and more complicated issue at hand here with regard to how an on-line publication should handle any sort of impropriety. This is actually something I've spent a lot of time considering, given my interest in on-line scholarly publishing and my role in setting up and promoting journals of this type. Convenient as a "delete" function might seem, it's not at all clear to me that one wants to allow published content to be "disappeared" in Stalinesque fashion, even if it is plagiarized or (more of a concern for us in the sciences) based on fabricated data. Most publishers and librarians concerned with these issues feel that one should not "erase" an article unless it is causing active harm because it contains libel or similar (*) . I agree with them on this point; if articles can suddenly disappear, an on-line publication becomes that much more untrustworthy than a paper one. I consider it to be preferable to publish a correction/retraction and leave the original article available in the interest of full transparency.
With the appropriate regards,
Carl
(*) E.g. as in your post above, where you come dangerously close to accusing me of first publishing and second failing to publically apologize for an article that I had nothing to do with.