ATGthePodcast 119 - Conversation with Anna Abalkina, Freie Universität Berlin

Against the Grain - The Podcast

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In today's episode we have an Interview of Anna Abalkina, research fellow, Freie Universität Berlin. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.

Anna has recently written an article for the Scholarly Kitchen entitled "Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing-Evidence From Russia." She has a background in international economics, but recently has turned her focus towards Academic Misconduct, Plagiarism and predatory and hijack journals.

Anna has been an expert at Disernet since its founding in 2013 and she is part of a network of Russian researchers. She joined because she found her own paper had been plagiarized. When she asked the journal to react, she was unhappy with their response and realized the lack of rights authors can have.

She said there is also wide plagiarism taking place in papers that have been translated from Russian to English and published outside of the Russian context by predatory journals.

The network has certain criteria on what predatory is and the colors and shadows of predatory and dishonest practices. They are trying to create a ranking of Russian journals to predict quality, honesty and fraudulent behavior patterns. She says corruption and potential damage to the Russian economy prevent the government from taking action against violation of ethical principles in the field of scientific publications. She says the threat has been underestimated against academic publishing and academic integrity, and she will continue her work with detection of hijack journals and creating a list of hijack journals that is timely and updated regularly.