I’m sure this was mentioned somewhere in the investigation but these read to me as perfect direct translations to Hanja-derived Korean words… probably the same terms used in Chinese.
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the authors are from the Thiagarajar College of Engineering, India. Judging from their website (“World class technical education with strong ethical values”) the language of instruction is likely to be English.
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All the more reason to cut, paste and autotranslate papers written in a different language. So long as your autotranslate is different than the anti plagiarism program uses, you just might be okay. Of course this means that the “authors” were too lazy, or understood the topic too poorly to even proofread the autotranslate program.
I am reminded of this bit of dialogue from the movie “What’s up, Doc?”
- (Kenneth Mars) “I think the Hugh Simon theory will stand the test of time.”
- (Barbra Streisand) “Exactly what is that theory Mr Simon?”
- (Kenneth Mars) “I doubt you are qualified to understand it but it says that the 16th and 17th century composers developed a uniform scale platform based upon the intervals utilised in the mountaineer yodel.”
- (Barbra Streisand) “And you developed this theory? That should come as a shock to Professor Findelmeyer.”
- (Kenneth Mars) “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
- (Barbra Streisand) “Sure you do, the Findelmeyer Proposition.”
- (Kenneth Mars) “I don’t know what you’re talking about, besides that has never been translated.”
- (Barbra Streisand) “Just once. Harvard Musicological review, 1925. It’s probably out of print now --”
- (Austin Pendleton) “Of course. Professor Heinrich Findelmeyer, the university of Zurich, 1911, the controversial Findelmeyer Proposition, no wonder it sounded so familiar. I’m sorry Simon”
- (Kenneth Mars) “This is despicable.”
- (Austin Pendleton) “Hugh, you’re a bad loser, you’re a plagiarist and you’re nasty. I don’t like you and I want you to go away.”
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Yes.
There are low-rent ones based mostly in India which charge you a small “reading fee.” There’s also a lot of pay-to-play presses. I know of one individual who got their job because they edited a collection and ghost-wrote social sciences publications for two local politicians to give them an academic veneer so that they could get cushy, high-paying jobs as university administrators. The whole book was published by one of these sketchy presses.
OTOH, I know a guy who is a real scholar with deep knowledge of his field, and who is in contact with excellent scholars on development issues and politics in that region, but because they’re all PoCs talking about issues in a “developing region,” he couldn’t find publishers. So he went with one of these “vanity presses” or “pay-to-play” presses, and he’s cranking out books that are, from all I can tell, really valuable, especially as part of the discourse in that region.
Similarly, there’s are two major presses which have reputations for being pay-to-play, and I know editors who have compiled really excellent volumes and published with these presses. One was on avant-garde poetry, and the other was on avant-garde painting and performance art. In the poetry case, I know exactly why: in that subfield you almost have to be a scion or hanger-on of a few people to get published. I know these people quite well, personally, and they’re good people and being old radicals would never accept/understand their stifling influence – but it’s real. The art book had a similar situation, but this time to do with moneyed patronage networks.
So not all pay-to-play publishing houses are the same. But they are tarred with the same brush by academics invested in existing power relations. Now, when it comes to the sciences, I got nothing to say.
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