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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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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.

 

Better safe than sorry. I don't know any graduate students that came up with original ideas. Most have just been put to work by the professors on something. There are a couple around, but I haven't had any classes with them or anything.

 

Develop? Effective response to constructive criticism includes demonstrating that it is the Criticizers lack of understanding that drove the criticism, when such is the case.

 

The idea is original, or everyone would know about it... assuming I don't run into any unforeseen obstacles in it's implementation. However, I have done extensive research into what other people have done similarly anyways, and I am sure I will be directed to do more.

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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

 

Successful? How do you manage success in the context of an organization that is fully supported by the government regardless of what it does? The FAILING education system is a giant monkey on the taxpayer's back, and change is being considered. It sounds like your criteria for success is the system performing it's most basic functionality at all, regardless of efficiency.

 

Change is feared because things always get worse before they get better when change occurs. Large organizations (especially governments) often favor waiting until the building comes crashing down around them as finally realized consequences of their inept methods before finally deciding that change is warranted.

 

Individuals (like those professors you mentioned running the university) favor change too much, and want to change everything just to test simple hypotheses about how things work instead of to match one well formulated plan resulting in frequent down-cycles of adaptation.

 

If you are dealing with corrupt government organizations, it pays to have a relationship or at least be familiar with the justice department or anyone you are sure is far enough above the "conspiracy". Gather evidence and have friends or family members (preferably as far away as possible) prepared to send it to them upon your death or disappearance, and do your best to make sure they know it. Groups like that are all over the place, the only thing the conspiracy theorists get wrong is over glorifying them.

 

In real life they usually consist of a bunch of ignorant rednecks and hillbillies who don't understand the complexities of law and are easily scared back in line by whatever organization is immediately above them.

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I have read about a lot of situations like this (not that necessary escalated to lawsuits) where the professor outright copied a paper written by a student and I don't get it. How hard is it to reverse engineer the idea into your own paper? If she doesn't understand it to that degree how could she be presenting it as her own research?

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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.

 

I am not assuming this. I trust and respect the person. I am just trying to determine to what degree should I protect myself.

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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 now owns the original copyright like you bring up.

That's right. But if they are part of the work of a university, they belong to that university, in the same way that everything that's published by a newspaper belongs to that newspaper unless otherwise noted. No newspaper writer ever has copyright to anything he writes that the newspaper publishes.

 

--lemit

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Successful? How do you manage success in the context of an organization that is fully supported by the government regardless of what it does? The FAILING education system is a giant monkey on the taxpayer's back, and change is being considered. It sounds like your criteria for success is the system performing it's most basic functionality at all, regardless of efficiency.

 

Change is feared because things always get worse before they get better when change occurs. Large organizations (especially governments) often favor waiting until the building comes crashing down around them as finally realized consequences of their inept methods before finally deciding that change is warranted.

 

Individuals (like those professors you mentioned running the university) favor change too much, and want to change everything just to test simple hypotheses about how things work instead of to match one well formulated plan resulting in frequent down-cycles of adaptation.

 

If you are dealing with corrupt government organizations, it pays to have a relationship or at least be familiar with the justice department or anyone you are sure is far enough above the "conspiracy". Gather evidence and have friends or family members (preferably as far away as possible) prepared to send it to them upon your death or disappearance, and do your best to make sure they know it. Groups like that are all over the place, the only thing the conspiracy theorists get wrong is over glorifying them.

 

In real life they usually consist of a bunch of ignorant rednecks and hillbillies who don't understand the complexities of law and are easily scared back in line by whatever organization is immediately above them.

There were no rednecks involved on either side of the confrontation in the 'Sixties. A State Assistant AG was assigned to the University. We worked with other Assistant AG's, but didn't give them the case they needed. If we had waited a couple years, we might have had a different outcome, but we were in danger of graduating and had to move quickly.

 

--lemit

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"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."

 

 

 

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.

 

Rather than being combative, since the phrase given was unique, one could have simply done a google search to find the source. Took me about 2 seconds. Since I am sure it was an error in omission, not an intentional attempt to deceive, I will provide the source for you.

 

Fred L. WORTH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. SELCHOW & RIGHTER COMPANY, Horn Abbott, Ltd., Defendants-Appellees. - Altlaw

 

If you are unable to use the find feature of your browser, just skip down to paragraph 19.

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That's right. But if they are part of the work of a university, they belong to that university, in the same way that everything that's published by a newspaper belongs to that newspaper unless otherwise noted. No newspaper writer ever has copyright to anything he writes that the newspaper publishes.

 

--lemit

 

I don't work for the university, I pay to go there. You seem to be assuming that I opted to receive funding. Usually this situation is governed by an employment relationship.

 

There were no rednecks involved on either side of the confrontation in the 'Sixties. A State Assistant AG was assigned to the University. We worked with other Assistant AG's, but didn't give them the case they needed. If we had waited a couple years, we might have had a different outcome, but we were in danger of graduating and had to move quickly.

 

--lemit

 

What I meant by this was that the people involved are generally ignorant of the reasons behind the laws they circumvent and generally hail from rural areas where it is easy to get away with that kind of thing. For every semi-intelligent conspirator there is a small town group of cronies who really aren't that bright from which he graduated.

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Rather than being combative, since the phrase given was unique, one could have simply done a google search to find the source. Took me about 2 seconds. Since I am sure it was an error in omission, not an intentional attempt to deceive, I will provide the source for you.

 

Fred L. WORTH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. SELCHOW & RIGHTER COMPANY, Horn Abbott, Ltd., Defendants-Appellees. - Altlaw

 

If you are unable to use the find feature of your browser, just skip down to paragraph 19.

 

How on earth did you come to the conclusion that it was my responsibility to verify his claims?

 

There is a single sentence in the faulty quote which bears resemblance to something said in the reference you provide. The rest of the "quote" is nowhere to be found.

 

This is a law reference, which is the only time I would tolerate what would otherwise be an appeal of their lack of ability to understand or explain their argument to another person since this means they are likely to be incapable of determining what is a relevant source and it would be a waste of my time.

 

Which means the reference is absolutely needed to see if the claim ever was true, and whether or not it has been overturned. The reference itself is worth far more than the argument or quote.

 

The truth of the matter is that there are conflicting issues in copyright law, and plenty of case law on the other side. Copyright is not limited to just the words that you use, and a smart person can link the use of their idea to being a violation of their copyright through these links.

 

The fact issue is also not as clear as he is trying to make it. Most case law addresses "facts" while some talk about "factual works".

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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.
Clearly this is a matter of ethics and it's obvious that the professor should not take undue credit. If you don't trust one as a supervisor, find one you can trust. :)

 

I have seen cases of students being given due credit and there are historic examples, like the two students who proposed the apparently zany idea of spin and de Broglie who's idea was in is grad thesis, but of course not all people are the same and bad apples exist.

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I don't work for the university, I pay to go there. You seem to be assuming that I opted to receive funding. Usually this situation is governed by an employment relationship.

 

 

 

What I meant by this was that the people involved are generally ignorant of the reasons behind the laws they circumvent and generally hail from rural areas where it is easy to get away with that kind of thing. For every semi-intelligent conspirator there is a small town group of cronies who really aren't that bright from which he graduated.

 

Sorry for the misunderstandings. Perhaps they result from the fact that I was the most rural person in that event.

 

--lemit

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I don't work for the university, I pay to go there. You seem to be assuming that I opted to receive funding. Usually this situation is governed by an employment relationship.

If you’re not employed by your school or some affiliate company, and have not signed a contract granting the right to patent any invention of yours to someone other than yourself, you should, in my inexpert legal opinion, have no more to fear of anyone stealing your inventions than any person in this position.

 

If it’s important to you that you’re not deprived of at least non-monetary credit, I think Erasmus’s suggestion is best:

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.

If it’s important to you that you’re not deprived of monetary compensation, I can’t imagine any safeguard other than sufficiently developing your ideas into patentable inventions, and patent them. As this involves lot of work and expense, likely much of it failing to produce patents, or producing patents that lead to little or no monetary or non-monetary rewards, and the work and expense can potentially interfere with ones education, I’d consider carefully before taking this approach.

 

It’s important to understand that an idea is not an invention, so any idea you may have may be used by another to make and patent an invention which will belong to her, him, or it, with no more compulsion to credit your contribution to the invention than their personal sense of courtesy and honor dictates. Copyrights apply to nearly any work – books or shorter written works, a still or moving images, written or performed music, etc, or even a short, fairly unique name or phrase – but not to the ideas expressed in these works. This principle is so well known it’s in even common encyclopedic references such as the wikipedia article “copyright”.

 

Certain kinds of ideas – for example, a procedures for doing things ranging from synthesizing chemicals to running businesses to throwing parties to giving spiritual development seminars, or even, in principle, writing a book or penning a drawing – can be patented, in which case anyone or ones using the procedure described in the patent, even if they were unaware of the patented procedure, is legally obliged to compensate the patent holder.

 

A major exception to this property scheme involves “copylefts”. Like copyrights, copylefts apply only to particular works, but unlike copyrights, which can be transferred by selling, gifting, or inheritance, and are of limited duration, copylefts prevent anyone from being compensated for the work.

 

Copylefts are especially important when applied to computer software – mostly in the form of the General Public License - enabling the Open Source movement. Significant practical and social impact aside, I think this is because software (the sort that actually works, that is :)) requires more effort per character than textual works like fiction and non-fictional natural language, and the underlying “ideas” of a particular work of it can only slightly or not at all easier to produce a different, similar work.

 

IMHO, “idea workers”, especially young ones, should give serious contemplation to whether they want at all to seek old-fashioned credit for and ownership of their ideas, works, and inventions. While there is, I think, some unrealistic hype around “open culture”, I strongly encourage every idea worker to be conversant in the idea, and if inclined, part of it. Good, if dated, descriptions can be found in Henrik Ingo’s Open Life book and blog, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture.

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  • 1 month later...

I do not disagree with open culture and use similar reasoning to be more persuasive with others by letting them take ownership of simple philosophical ideas even if it took great effort on my part to convince them. This avoids a situation where everyone thinks of that person as less capable because they were persuaded by me. I also feel as though it is unavoidable that I am assigned due credit because of the frequency with which it happens. The situation in academia seems different to me, and there seems to be more of a threat of someone successfully using deception to diminish my role.

 

 

If someone makes a major breakthrough or creates a great idea, there is a good chance there are attributes of that person that allowed them to do so where others failed.

 

If you are the type of person that has those attributes, not only should people have an accurate idea of who to turn to in order to get further information etc, but nothing seems more wrong than than to have someone without these attributes, who perhaps even was previously skeptical of your abilities based on simple minded factors like race or appearance take credit for them.

 

In many average cases it may be accurate that a professor's experience and abilities were more responsible for the end result of a student's research than the student's efforts.

 

And so I feel like there is a danger of a professor trying to promote this assumption in cases where it is not true. I do not have much of a problem with anything up to the professor sharing the idea with others in formal settings, as long as my name is mentioned not assigned less credit than it is due (I don't care if credit isn't assigned, as long as it's not falsely assigned).

 

My problem starts when the person says anything like "my idea" "what I have done" or refers to my role as minor. I believe such actions are not in line with open culture, and that there is little I can do to prevent them if I have not taken any precautions prior to that point.

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