Group items tagged

Benchmarkreviews.com reviews office equipment, and posts a review about a chair that sounds ... off. It turns out that the review lifts phrases and content from press releases about the chair. Benchmarkreviews responds by permanently banning the person investigating the plagiarism -- and publishing his real name, address and phone number.

A review of the 2012 Conference on Ethics and Publishing.

No surprise here: Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has a viral infection. For once, however, it's not the Norovirus but that new-fangled byproduct of Web 2.0, the viral marketing infiltration. ... So what's the big deal? Well, it seems that the "Royal Champions" weren't always up front about their status as compensated reviewers, effectively misleading readers of CruiseCritic forums with their positive comments.

A math journal published by Elsevier published over 300 research articles written by the Editor-in-Chief. The articles appear to have bypassed the peer-review process entirely.

LBF gives a platform to the censors of Chinese Communist Party and stifles the voices of Chinese ex-pats and critics.

Nancy Koehn, Harvard Business School professor and historian, explains how socially responsible business dates back to modern capitalism's founding era.

I'm not entirely convinced by CrossMark, but Retraction Watch is right that peer review doesn't (and shouldn't) stop at publication.

Oxford University Press editorial policy comes under fire.  The president of OUP will be a keynote speaker at this year's Ethics and Publishing Conference.

OK, this is not about ethics, per se, but it is a very interesting article on the effects of being hyper-connected. Maybe we are losing contact with our domestic lives, family and our ability to think. Or, maybe the predictions that our always-connected society is heading for intellectual doom are just natural reactions to new technology. Consider this quote from the article, "Socrates believed that scrolls would erode thought by permitting people to forget what they had learned because they'd be able to look things up, that 'they wouldn't feel the need to remember it from the inside, completely on their own.' Worse, writing wouldn't 'allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.'"

Authors and readers respond to Amazon's "glitch." I found this link through poet Mark Doty, who writes incredible poetry and happens to be gay. His books were among those that "disappeared."

Read the original article by Darnton first and then also see the full text of Courant reply on his blog at http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/04/google-robert-darnton-and-the-digital-republic-of-letters/

Although this NYT opinion piece deals with more than just judicial censhorship, it give a very apocolyptic view of the influence of courts on higher education in several categories that I find very frightening in the same way that the fact that one judge was able to censor a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" without any academic review or input was bone-chilling to me.

A federal judge ruled in favor of a defendant who reposted an entire article in a copyright case on Monday, Wired reports. The lawsuit was brought by Righthaven, a Las Vegas-based "copyright litigation factory," according to Wired, that has sued more than 200 websites, bloggers, and commenters for copyright infringement. This particular lawsuit targeted Wayne Hoehn, who posted an entire editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its headline, "Public Employee Pensions: We Can't Afford Them" on a website medjacksports.com.