Tempted by Shortcuts, Academics Put Integrity in Peril

Offers for ghostwriting services as a shortcut to produce scientific papers seem very tempting. Scientific work ghostwriting service agencies are connected to campus institutional networks.

IRENE SARWINDANINGRUM

One of the conversations from one of the sources for Kompas Daily regarding the transaction of professorship assistance. Kompas received it on Friday (10/2/2023).

Offers for ghostwriting services as a shortcut to produce scientific papers seem very tempting. Spurred by the ambition to gain a ticket to rank up the academic ladder, some lecturers simply could not resist the temptation and go for it at all costs, even at the expense of integrity.

Scientific work ghostwriting service agencies are connected to campus institutional networks. Fellow lecturers offer each other shortcuts in their seeking for promotions, as well as professorship nomination tickets through the required publication of candidates’ scientific papers in international journals. “The offer for [ghostwriting services] in our campus is at higher rates. They know that our campus provides incentives for lecturers who manage to publish their articles in Scopus indexed journals Q1 and Q2," WJ, a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University of North Sumatra (UMSU), said in Medan on Wednesday (18/1/2023).

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Giving a comparison, he said the rate for having articles published in international journals by using a broker, at state universities in the city was Rp 15 million, while at UMSU it was Rp 25 million.

The collusion is carried out when clients prepare their writing materials by themselves, or the rough writing materials need to be revised through ghostwriting, or the ghostwriting agent does all the work. Of all these types, the third service has been mostly pursued by clients in Medan, which means a delegation of scientific work to writing jockeys.

Ambition over lecturing credit

Toward 2020, ON, a lecturer at Medan State University (Unimed), used a jockey’s service to compile dozens of seminar papers to be sent to international publishers. Someone who brokered the jockeying services set a tariff of more than Rp 100 million to be disbursed when their proceedings were published in a journal in Europe.

ON was shocked to find the broker already at campus when the conference was just over. At the request of his senior fellow lecturer, ON submitted the proceedings of the conference participants to the broker. "They can write articles to be published in journals. Of course the service cost money," ON quoted the broker as saying during an interview on Thursday (19/1/2023).

What ON and the team of lecturers did at campus was a shortcut. The procedure should be that the seminar committee contact the publisher through its official website, followed by communication to discuss regulations, costs, templates, plagiarism tolerance, references, citation formats, publishing deadlines, minimum amounts of articles and the rate per article. When agreed upon, marked with the signing of a publication cooperation contract, the committee sent all articles that met the publisher's standards. Two to three months later, the article appeared in the publication.

ALBERDI DITTO PERMADI

A lecturer at a university in North Sumatra when being interviewed regarding patterns of fraud in the nomination of professors on January 19 2023.

The demand for lecturers to enhance credit scores has been high, with them being pushed to publish scientific papers, as stated in the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry Regulation No. 20/2017 concerning Professional Lecturer Allowances and Honorary Professor Allowances.

Lecturers with the rank of lektor kepala (assistant professor) who fail to fulfill the required standards risk their professional allowances being suspended. Professors who cannot fulfill the requirement that they publish scientific papers in international journals for three consecutive years also face the risk of allowance suspension.

According to ON, it is common for university administrators to involve other parties in publishing the proceedings in the hope to enhance the institutional accreditation. "At that time, the credit score [converted from] having proceedings published was quite decent," ON said.

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When asked for a confirmation, Medan State University chancellor Syamsul Gultom said he was not aware about a third party being involved in the publication of scientific papers at his university. He admitted no one had ever offered a mediation to publish scientific papers to reputable international journals. "We follow the procedure. The procedure is clear that the articles are submitted. They check them. Being worthy, they will be published,” he said.

Many lecturers are keen to have articles published in international journals with good reputation because the credit score it carries is significant. However, some of them opt for shortcuts by using jockeys. “The practice of jockeying continues to occur in line with the increasing demand for the services. They are ready to serve. They even often come to campus," ON said.

According to ON, the temptation to use jockey services for lecturers is relatively high because several campuses offer incentives for articles published in accredited journals. Lecturers want to be promoted. The requirement for promotion from 3D to 4A employment grade, for example, is that lecturers have articles published in international journals.

ALBERDI DITTO PERMADI

The house of a scientific work jockey service provider in Medan, North Sumatra when visited on Saturday, January 21 2023.

Shifting to the fringe

The way how lecturers fraud publishing scientific papers is very diverse. Apart from paying the ghostwriting service agencies, the first way sees lecturers put their names as the authors of the scientific papers they never conduct research on. This is reportedly to be common among lecturers in pursuing their master or PHD titles.

The second way is that lecturers order articles according to the field of their expertise, with the broker facilitating up to the publication of the articles in a journal. The third way, lecturers submit the article draft with the broker passing them on to ghostwriting agencies to do the rest.

Budi Wignyosukarto, a retired professor at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, said he found more subtle fraudulent practices with jockeys offering the lecturers’ names as authors of scientific articles via electronic mail. Interested lecturers, he said, would only need to pay the jockey to have their names automatically pinned as the authors of the articles. Thus, lecturers who jumped at the offer did not need to do the research or writing processes, he said.

Also read:

> Prospective Professors Involved in ‘Joki’ Scheme for Research Papers

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The practices, he said, were common among lecturers with only one person doing the article, while those interested in the article only put their names by paying around Rp 5 million. “The topic can be adjusted to the field of those who are willing to pay. This first writer is usually lecturers who are looking for credit points for their professorship proposal. Meanwhile, others don't need to be first writers because they're not at the moment proposing for professorship," he said.

The Kompas investigation team also found practices in communication forums about journals on Facebook and Telegram groups. A posting at the end of December 2022 on Facebook, for example, showed someone looking for researchers who were interested in publishing a journal on the topic of education for the indexed journal Sinta 3. This offer was responded to by several people who then negotiated via Whatsapp.

This phenomenon has eroded the integrity of lecturers as educators. Lecturers who are ambitiously pursuing promotion are no longer committed to prioritizing teaching activities.

The process of having articles published in reputable international journals does take time and energy. "We are paid to teach," Mardianto, dean of the Tarbiyah and Teacher Training School (FITK) of North Sumatra State Islamic University, said.

Using a jockey, lecturers get academic credit without doing research. In this way, they can apply for a promotion straightaway, while the spirit to revive the academic climate in classes diminishes. Campuses are no longer a space for academic debate. Without improvement, Indonesian higher education is put in peril.

This article was translated by Musthofid.