Sense & Sensibility

It is worth recalling how Richard Feynman once publicized his opinion on scientific truth. In his book entitled The Meaning of It All, he wrote, 'No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated.'

This celebrated theoretical physicist's comment pointed out that, for the sake of human intellectual development, every scientist's rationality and sensitivity should be encouraged and respected without any external pressure. However, at the same time, we should add that all scientific researchers should hold fast to their own ethics throughout the publication process. That is because above all, originality, which is of the utmost value in science, shall be maintained. Otherwise, we have already arrived on the verge of plagiarism.

Although not a crime in the legal sense, plagiarism should be regarded as a serious offense to academia. The plagiarizer, who represents dishonesty and fraud, should be censured and expelled from academia in the end. Still, plagiarism is too common for us to remain complacent. Very recently, a controversy arose on this issue in India. Those involved are an eminent scientist, the chairman of a government institute, and their students. They had apologized to the journal Advanced Materials for having published a paper that copied sentences from another one for a small part of the introduction. Although the editorial committee of Advanced Materials scrutinized their paper once they learned about the copied content, they concluded that the misstep was not serious enough to merit retraction. Instead, they published the authors' apology in conjunction with the article. Nevertheless, the seriousness with which this incident was treated, even when only a few sentences were copied, offers us a fresh reminder of the virtue of originality.

To ensure publication ethics, the editorial board of Journal of Periodontal & Implant Science spares no effort in reviewing all of the papers submitted to us. As a consequence, we have already joined CrossRef, which is a reliable not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content. One of the services provided by CrossRef is CrossCheck, which helps us actively engage in the work of plagiarism detection. With this service, we have detected possible plagiarism in several papers, and informed the corresponding authors. Through this process, all of us can maintain our integrity, as individuals, and as an academic society.

As we solicit the submission of truly novel manuscripts reporting on original work, we cannot overemphasize the value of publication ethics in scientific research. When we engage in the academic research and publication process with integrity, we can proceed not clandestinely but transparently.