Page 41 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

We now present a case where a well-established group abstained from acknowledging our work,
and desisted from giving us credit. A paper in 2013 (Nayak, et al., 2013a) showed the magnetization
hysteresis loops of Mn PtGa having an anomalous virgin curve that lay outside at the temperature
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of 2K. The anomaly became less prominent as temperature was raised, disappearing at 40K. This
was exactly what we had shown in 2001, in doped CeFe in our paper in Physical Review B. We had
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explained this as due to kinetic-arrest. This paper appeared 12 years later, in the later journal from the
same parent journal, apparently oblivious of our paper and of our explanation.

Within a few months, in April 2013, the same group published another paper (Nayak, et al., 2013b)
on the same material. This paper was titled “Kinetic arrest related to a first-order ferrimagnetic to anti
ferromagnetic transition in the Heusler compound Mn PtGa”. The abstract started with the sentence
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“We report a magnetization study of the Heusler compound Mn PtGa that shows the existence
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of a magnetic-glass state.” The references to our published papers were in passing, but there was no
reference to our papers published after 2007, specifically none to our creation of the CHUF protocol.
However, their main experimental results section starts with “To probe the existence of a magnetic-
glass state in Mn PtGa, we have performed M(T) measurement in 1T after cooling the sample in
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different fields.” They performed measurements using the CHUF protocol, without using our words.
Their paraphrasing avoided detection of text-similarity, and also avoided giving us credit. Or was this
just another case of plagiarizing our idea, with clever manipulation of words to avoid the radar of
software that detects text-similarity?

In these instances, there is an attempt to usurp credit by using different terminologies. We shall
now discuss whether active researchers must bear the burden of victims, continuing to highlight the
plagiarism of their work or ideas, or there can be an institutionalized mechanism for closure of such
misdemeanors that leaves them free to pursue their research. Young Indian researchers, particularly,
should not be distracted from their research activities. We recognize that researchers who propose
out-of-the-box ideas are more likely to suffer from reviewer bias and be victims of idea plagiarism.
Research in India is expanding with many new HEIs being set up in smaller cities. Young researchers
in such emerging bylines, if they become victims of idea-plagiarism, should not be left to fight
individual battles for ownership of their novel ideas.

It is clear that we need a mechanism to help Indian researchers retain their ownership, to safeguard
our IPR (Intellectual Property Rights). I now propose such a mechanism, for consideration of UGC.

I propose that there should be, on the UGC-CARE website, a well-publicized invitation like “Has
someone taken your published work or idea, paraphrased it to escape detection by software,
and passed it as their own? Do independent area-experts agree that you should have been given
credit?”
Any submission (I would not use the word ‘complaint’) in response to this, by individual
researchers, must then be evaluated by an independent set of area-experts. These experts could
even be the peer-reviewers of established journal who approve the publication of an erratum or a
comment, or could be area-experts selected by UGC-CARE. Experts would have already approved
the correction or notice that is published by the journal; UGC-CARE area-experts could approve
a suitably worded notice. In either case, this notice would then be posted on the UGC-CARE
website, and given enhanced visibility as IPR for “non-patentable research”. Such extensive visibility
is necessary to ensure that Indian researchers are not victims of plagiarism, of someone else taking
the work or idea of a researcher in an Indian HEI and passing it off as his or her own. Ethics in
publishing research must ensure that researchers in our HEIs are neither perpetrators nor victims
of plagiarism.

30 | University Grants Commission