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What can a professor get away with when it comes to working with student's research?


Kriminal99

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My question is, what would a student have to be concerned about regarding professors capitalizing on the requirement of students to work with senior academics as far as who is deemed responsible for the research?

 

In some cases if a student approaches a professor without a research interest, the professor puts the student to work on something they have been working on. How is this situation differentiated (if at all) from the situation where the student approaches the professor with a new research idea and the professor offers to help?

 

Is it just an issue of whether the student goes on to provide more contributions in the field..

 

Meaning that a student might limit their initial research to a small piece of the puzzle.. or is this hazardous because might the professor use the understanding of the topic given by assisting the student to preemptively publish the more climatic results of that research path "on their own"?

 

I understand the goal of the enviornment is to get new ideas out in the open as quickly as possible, but other issues must be considered. For one, there must be motivation for people to share their ideas in this manner as opposed to patenting them and attempting to capitalize. Having someone else take the credit for the contribution hardly qualifies. Second, a person's level of credibility affects the ease with which they are able to make further contributions and so it is important that a person who is capable of such contributions is accurately assigned that credibility.

 

I also understand that many professors (especially one that I would choose to work with) are intelligent enough to pick up on a new idea and fully understand and work with it in a short time period, and that they devote time apart from their busy lives to help students navigate the minefield of academia. I understand that taking even a fully developed idea and getting it to the stage where it can be published is significant work that a professor should receive credit for assisting with.

 

However, everything is impossibly trivial once you understand it (in this case, once someone else explains it to you), and it would grossly arrogant and unrealistic to simply presume the elder the protagonist in the presentation of any new idea. Especially in a case where the participation of said elder would not be necessary for the other party to successfully publish the idea.

 

By the way, I respect the person I am working with and just want a clearer picture of how things work in this arena. I am also far to clever for anyone to succeed at taking credit for my accomplishment as long as it would be understood as academic dishonesty by the world at large.

 

What I am more concerned about is if academia has created some kind of philosophical distortion of truth in which "elders" are automatically assigned credit for the discoveries of their students - in which case I need to take a different path with my research.

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Any professor, was at one time a student,, and has already done his or her internship. They had the same thing done to them. It like a fraternity pledging cycle, one goes though the hazing to become a member. Once a member, they haze the next generation.

 

The mentor of each cycle, has built a reputation and has knowledge of the inner workings of the process. They know how to screen and get topics published, so the student can begin to build their own reputation. It is sort of a closed society. If you know the secret handshake the door opens. The society will also allow charter members to bring guests into the society. Once others meet you, through your chaperone, you might also get a key. If you become a professor, the cycle begins again with the next pledge class. Part of the kick back is a little skim off the top to make up for when you got skimmed.

 

Years ago, I used to work at a National Lab. Publishing was easy, with anything you did being published. It has its own inner circle, so once inside, you just publish. I tired to make sure I produced results, rather than statistical double talk, which does meet the minimum requirement. That was too easy and felt like cheating.

 

If you are on the outside, trying to get in, there will be guards at the door. The same level of effort is not quite enough as a back door pass. If you take your idea and go solo, you may knock at the door, but without a chaperone, only the little door with eyeballs will open asking for the password, such as professor X. Your best bet is take the initial hit. But keep a couple of good ideas in your head, so when you knock by yourself, the door may open for you as a solo agent. Or if you become a professor, then take back what was taken from you, to keep the tradition going. It all averages out in the end.

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Hazing is illegal, and strictly speaking, so is what you are suggesting.

 

There's a couple of issues with what you are saying - and I always fight for the truth until everything has changed to accommodate it (usually successfully) despite the current state of disarray things might be in so it is irrelevant to me how much the system currently supports your viewpoint. (Or observed state of the system, whichever)

 

The purpose of academia is to increase the spread of knowledge... to provide an arena where people can basically donate information to the world at large. This is completely at odds with picture you paint.

 

This country absolutely cannot afford to use American tax dollars to support those (potentially foreign nationals) who would create a fraudulent career for themselves by taking credit for the work of home grown talent and snuffing out their careers before they start. If you or others like you would like to create a secret society in your backyard on your own dime with the secret passwords you mention then feel free. America has absolutely no interest in supporting such a venture.

 

If anyone attempts anything like this with me I will completely destroy them and any part of the system that attempts to support it.

I understand that certain standards must be upheld as far as the way in which people "donate" information, and that a sort of apprenticeship system is one way to make sure those standards are upheld. But this should in no way compromise a person's ability to take credit for their own work and thus build a career (and their ability to "donate" knowledge in the future).

 

I don't have to come to anyone in academia with my work, and could instead choose to capitalize on it (or god knows what else). Also the importance of the work is certainly an issue. If it involves a minor improvement on someone else's work regarding a half-life calculation, I would totally agree that tutoring a student on how to effectively produce publishable research is as valuable as the research itself.

 

If on the other hand it was something like Einstein's theory of relativity (and the a-bombs that go with it), the entire current system of academia becomes irrelevant in comparison and all that matters is the idea and the person most capable of understanding and working with it.

 

Without careful thought it may seem like a good idea to allow tenured professors to get away with taking work from students as a way of enticing them to stick around. What this line of thought fails to consider is that there is a reason the "tenured professor" did not come up with the idea and the student did, and what this means for the professor's ability to effectively develop the idea to full fruition.

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Let's talk about (1) Contract, and (2) Intellectual property.

 

CONTRACTS

 

When a professor promises to do something for a student, or when a student promises to do something for a professor, both situations are eqaully contract like. there are expectations of both parties.

 

If student helps a professor, the expectation is that the final product belongs to the professor, and that the student will receive credit, whether academic or publishing, for research provided. If the professor helps the student the expectations are that the final product belongs to the students, and the professor will gain reasearch material, ideas, and publishing credit.

 

in both cases ideas and research are shared.

 

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

 

Ideas in and of themselves are not protected. Research always belongs to the university and may not be published outside without university's permission. Ideas, udner copyright laws, are not protected until the work is created. until that time, if both professor and student find it interesting and start to compete, that who finishes first gets the copyright. Generally, both works will be sufficiently different, to have separate copyrights. But sometimes it may not be the case. In such case that who finishes first gets the copyright. The fact that ideas were shared is of no moment to determination of rights. ideas are not protected. So if you want to protect them, keep them secret.

 

EDIT: Copyrights are a matter of federal law. Although copyright is created when the work is completed, there are other things needed to gain access to federal court. namely, your work should provide a notice to others that it is copyrighted such as "Copyright 2009 John Doe." In addition, you should register your work with the United States Copyright Office. (Scientific Formulas, methods such as Pythagorian Theorem, ideas, are not protected.)

If the work includes a design, then it should be patented under your name through the University. How this is done is a political decisions, or it is spelled out in some manual. If patent is done under University's supervisions it belongs to the University. If you decide to leave University and patent your design yourself, you may be infringing University's rights. Contact an attorney.

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Copyrights are automatic upon the creation of a work (and are registered for formality and record-keeping) so what you say hardly offends justice.

 

As long as I can preempt (or revoke) any copyright of a work that addresses an idea that was already addressed by a "work" I had previously created. Ideas are only not protected because to do so is impossible (or at least, prohibitively expensive)

 

If the professor extends the idea after the fact then he should rightfully receive credit for that.

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Ideas are only not protected because to do so is impossible (or at least, prohibitively expensive)

 

Costly is a better word. The cost to society, of protecting ideas, is prohibitively high. If I could copyright an idea of walking backwards, or sitting and eating. Then, I could demand paymenf from everyone, which would impose prohibitively high cost on society. Life would be impossible.

 

If the professor extends the idea after the fact then he should rightfully receive credit for that.

 

The point is, who should receive credit is a matter of who completes the work first. Other than that, if you want to protect your ideas, keep'em secret.

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Costly is a better word. The cost to society, of protecting ideas, is prohibitively high. If I could copyright an idea of walking backwards, or sitting and eating. Then, I could demand paymenf from everyone, which would impose prohibitively high cost on society. Life would be impossible.

 

The point is, who should receive credit is a matter of who completes the work first. Other than that, if you want to protect your ideas, keep'em secret.

 

The person to invent walking backwards is long dead. Trying to figure out who really came up with the idea would be the costly part.

 

A written work is just an idea on paper. If I have an idea that I share with a professor, in written form, or I have previously written the idea prior to sharing it with him, those written "works" are automatically copy written and preempt any attempt by the professor to publish the same idea. Although to be safe one of these written records should be registered.

 

The only situation where he could legally steal my idea is when I told him about it but never kept any written record of the idea such that anyone could really know it was mine.

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I would say that this definitely depends on your country. In the US all written and even spoken work is copyrighted. Speeches are considered to be copyrightable. So if you presented the ideas/work in an official speech you are copyrighted. On the other hand, if you just gave your idea out free of charge in some private setting you are pretty much out of luck if someone, in this case a professor, steals it.

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If you are worried about theft, throw your paper on a pre-print server somewhere. As long as a document is out there, dated, on the net, you've established your priority.

 

But if you have no concrete reason to be worried about theft, you are just being paranoid. Talking to a professors graduate students should give you a feel for how the academic environment of a group.

 

Also, be aware that publication is a back and forth process- you will need to develop some ability to respond effectively to constructive criticism.

 

Edit: Further, before approaching someone with your ideas, its worth doing a literature search to make sure someone else hasn't had your idea earlier. You'd be surprised how hard it can be to be original in practically any field.

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My question is, what would a student have to be concerned about regarding professors capitalizing on the requirement of students to work with senior academics as far as who is deemed responsible for the research? ...

 

some statistical analysis of case law involving students/professors intellectual property disputes might give some indication of what is or is not a reasonable level of concern. how often do thefts actually occur and what are the actual consequences of those thefts? :)

 

in any regard, a copyright, trademark, patent, or what-have-you-legal-protection-terminology-of-intellectual-property is only as good as one's ability to enforce and/or protect it. a professor, or anyone for that matter, can get away with what they can get away with when it comes to working with students', or any others', research. :naughty:

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A written work is just an idea on paper. If I have an idea that I share with a professor, in written form, or I have previously written the idea prior to sharing it with him, those written "works" are automatically copy written and preempt any attempt by the professor to publish the same idea. Although to be safe one of these written records should be registered.

 

"'Plagiarism, which many people commonly think has to do with copyright, is not in fact a legal doctrine. True plagiarism is an ethical, not a legal, offense and is enforceable by academic authorities, not courts. Plagiarism occurs when someone -- a hurried student, a neglectful professor, an unscrupulous writer -- falsely claims someone else's words, whether copyrighted or not, as his own.'"

FindACase™ | Santilli v. Cardone

 

"The discovery of a fact or idea, regardless of the quantum of labor and expense, is simply not the work of an author. The copyright is limited to those aspects of the work -- termed "expression" -- that display the stamp of the author's originality. This is particularly true of factual works. Because authors who wish to express ideas in factual works are usually confined to a narrow range of expression, similarity of expression may have to amount to verbatim reproduction or very close paraphrasing before a factual work will be deemed infringed."

 

"Professors can not bring a copyright infringement action pertaining to certain software because the software was created within the scope of the professors' employment and therefore was work made for hire pursuant to 17 U.S.C.S. § 201(:naughty:. As a result, the university is the author for purposes of the Copyright Act; not the professors."

 

EDIT: http://www.uah.edu/legal/pdf_files/rights_in_theses_and_dissertations.pdf

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:naughty:

 

Student Wins Suit Accusing A Professor Of Plagiarism - The New York Times

Student Wins Suit Accusing A Professor Of Plagiarism

 

Ruling that a professor at the University of Ottawa had plagiarized an M.B.A. student's paper, an Ontario court has ordered the university and the professor to pay the former student $7,500 in damages and to reimburse legal costs.

...

The case is unusual because although graduate students sometimes complain privately about professors' appropriating their work without credit, they seldom take legal action because they fear jeopardizing their degree or their references. ...

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A university does not depend on the individuals within it for its survival.

 

To plagiarize Lawcat's work in this thread, in the U.S., work done in a university context belongs to the university. The university then welcomes promulgation of the work under the names of the employee (professor) and the university. It does not allow the professor to take sole credit for the work. That belongs to the university.

 

The student is a contributor to the process of creation, like a Baroque gargoyle artist. He or she may be given credit for contributions to the university should he or she choose to pursue a career in academic study within the field, but no mention of the student's name will be made, except occasionally in acknowledgements. Like the Medieval Church in which higher education was created, modern universities are heirarchical. They would have changed centuries ago if they were not successful at what they do.

 

In the 'Sixties, I was one of the students trying to change higher education because it was corrupt. Leadership of the university I was attending were using dummy corporations to buy land in anticipation of the research campuses they were going to create. Our chief supporting witness disappeared mysteriously somewhere in west Texas, a thousand miles away from the Grand Jury he was supposed to testify for. Nothing changed. The chief offender was later discreetly removed because he had had a dalliance with the wife of one of the deans.

 

Years later, I needed to help a friend redesign a university's structure. The faculty, having been given a voice, were running the university and were beginning to destroy it from within. After rereading all the stuff I had read years ago in graduate school courses in the philosophy of education, I decided that possibly the best design of a university is the "Ivory Tower." It removes that specialized community from the modern world, in which it doesn't really seem to function all that well, and allows it the distance it needs for dispassionate observation of the world.

 

Of course, by the time I was prepared to offer the results of my study, my friend had been sent off to an urban campus contained in a single downtown highrise. The university has gone through a half dozen changes in leadership in the 15 years since then. I no longer know anyone in the administration, and no longer allow myself to care that much.

 

--lemit

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some statistical analysis of case law involving students/professors intellectual property disputes might give some indication of what is or is not a reasonable level of concern. how often do thefts actually occur and what are the actual consequences of those thefts?

I agree.

 

My personal experience is that academics, both students and professors, are free, even generous with giving credit where it’s due, but as likely as trades and sales people to be secretive and dishonest where money is involved. For example, ca, 1980, the director of a college-run CAI (computer-assisted instruction software – a popular enterprise in those days) lab where I worked as an undergraduate routinely published academic papers about the work of me and others in the lab, always crediting even students and contractors who made even minor creative and technical contributions to the work, while keeping his staff and the school and state administration as much in the dark as possible concerning for-profit marketing of the software. Being vaguely suspicious of this, we tended to sneak copyright notices into compiled executable code, with the idea that it might give us a claim to sales and licensing fees should our finished programs appear as commercial software.

 

I never had a hit on a copyright notice with my name in any of my CAI code, but did on some code I wrote under contract. In this case, I was never paid for several hundred hours work done after a project ran out of money, with the documented promise that I would be when and if funding was restored. The software, medical instrument control and information software, was sold years later for a lot of money (about $250,000 1984 US). The purchaser had a problem with it, couldn’t get support, found my name in it, and contacted me. I contacted my original employers, and they coughed up about twice what they owed me for unpaid hourly work.

 

When ones work leads to an invention of substantial monetary value, the distinction between credit for the invention and ownership of it becomes very significant. In most schools and businesses, expect when unusual contracts are involved, ones school and/or employer owns ones inventions, while you “own” the credit for them. You can be held civilly liable (or even, in what to my knowledge is a single case in the US, that of Peter Taborsky ca 1987, criminally liable) if you commercialize your inventions, independently or for another school or company, while your school or company can be held liable for damage to your earnings or reputation if it falsely denies or assigns credit for your invention to another. Though to the best of my knowledge it never involved a civil lawsuit, a famous example of a dispute of credit that entailed not only reputation but ultimately a lot of money (a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine and improved future earnings) was who discovered the fundamental technology of MRI.

 

So, in answer to this thread’s original question,

My question is, what would a student have to be concerned about regarding professors capitalizing on the requirement of students to work with senior academics as far as who is deemed responsible for the research?

I think students should not be too much concerned. Although I’ve no well statistically supported journalistic and/or legal studies to support it, my first hand, second hand, and more removed anecdotal experience suggests it’s best to assume your professors will deal with you honorably, until actual experience proves otherwise for a specific person or organization, and when and if this occurs, avoid them in the future and/or sue them.

 

To assume ill intentions of a class of people, such as college professors, without credible evidence is, I think, over imaginative, or even paranoid.

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Thanks, Craig, for accurately softening my fairly harsh assessment. Yes, universities are generally mindful of the fact that they need to take care of their real talent, the students.

 

Although I gradually came to understand the way universities worked, I never liked it. But that was my fault.

 

--lemit

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"'Plagiarism, which many people commonly think has to do with copyright, is not in fact a legal doctrine. True plagiarism is an ethical, not a legal, offense and is enforceable by academic authorities, not courts. Plagiarism occurs when someone -- a hurried student, a neglectful professor, an unscrupulous writer -- falsely claims someone else's words, whether copyrighted or not, as his own.'"

FindACase™ | Santilli v. Cardone

 

"The discovery of a fact or idea, regardless of the quantum of labor and expense, is simply not the work of an author. The copyright is limited to those aspects of the work -- termed "expression" -- that display the stamp of the author's originality. This is particularly true of factual works. Because authors who wish to express ideas in factual works are usually confined to a narrow range of expression, similarity of expression may have to amount to verbatim reproduction or very close paraphrasing before a factual work will be deemed infringed."

 

"Professors can not bring a copyright infringement action pertaining to certain software because the software was created within the scope of the professors' employment and therefore was work made for hire pursuant to 17 U.S.C.S. § 201(:). As a result, the university is the author for purposes of the Copyright Act; not the professors."

 

EDIT: http://www.uah.edu/legal/pdf_files/rights_in_theses_and_dissertations.pdf

 

All words are automatically copyrighted upon being written, and registration with the copyright is just to provide better evidence of who wrote it first. So there is close to a 1:1 relationship between plagiarism and copyright infringement, save for the fact that plagiarism is still an issue even if the author no longer owns the original copyright like you bring up.

 

By the way. The second to last paragraph is presented with quotes but is not in either of the two references you provided. Nice try. The second reference is nothing but an argument presented by the university, and may be contradicted by revisions and other case law.

 

It is interesting that you threw that second to last paragraph in there because it demonstrates that you realize that explaining some ideas may require a narrow range of language which affords some protection under copyright. This is the type of protection sought and acquired, and also registering proves who came up with the idea first if nothing else.

 

Anyways I trust and respect the guy I am working with, there is just one part of his mannerisms that drove me to take extra steps.

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