The fraud that Data Colada presents here is unambiguous. It was also no accident in my opinion that they are specifically mentioning that the 3 Excel files were “Last saved by” “Dan Ariely”

I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired for this, but I really wish the Feds would prosecute cases like this as wire fraud instead of leaving insular academic institutions to self-police. This type of fraud is done for personal gain and self-enrichment and causes real, identifiable harms.

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MarceliusK an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'd be pretty wary of stretching wire fraud law to cover this. Prosecutors deciding whether scientific results are fraudulent sounds like it could create its own set of ugly incentives

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hn_throwaway_99 an hour ago | parent [-]

Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.

I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.

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Calazon 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.

	▲	coldtea 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If it gets so bad that a society/academic system needs to criminalize such fraud, they have already lost that race. The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.

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logifail 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> leaving insular academic institutions to self-police

I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.

Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.

With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.

I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.

The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.

I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...