Meta FAIR refuses to cite a pre-existing open-source project – to claim novelty
granadacoders.esHaven’t read the paper (or looked at the code), but not sure there’s a general obligation to cite anything that’s not a pre-print/published. If they knew of and used the code, that would be a different story, but otherwise it seems okay, if understandably frustrating for the person that wrote the code.
This is especially the case for something like this where it’s a relatively obvious idea and the evaluation matters more.
I'm not sure if there is obligation to cite anything. It's a question of ethics.
A claim of proposing a novel method should be corrected in a scientific publication if shown false. Otherwise the author is knowingly adding falsehoods into the body of scientific knowledge, and their institution is allowing it.
I'm not in academia so forgive this for being a naive question: is it expected that if you publish a preprint, and someone comes to you with related work that you haven't studied/considered/used, that you then add a citation to that work?
It's not illegal to omit citing existing work, like it isn't illegal to lie. It is highly unethical to knowingly claim to propose a novel approach which has been publicly proposed, and even implemented before though.
In effect this is erasing independent practitioners as inventors of methods from the history of science, and claiming false credit.
So a reasonable remedy in this case would have been to strike the text that says the work is novel? When you say "claiming false credit" I'm assuming you mean "getting to claim credit for it being a novel idea even after being told it's not".
When I think of citations, I think of ways of references that also attribute credit. Maybe this is different in academia? At least for me, I'd see a citation in this specific case as improper, because (assuming they didn't know able the author's work) the paper doesn't include anything from the author of the post. It would seem to me that before you'd include a citation, you'd want to take the time to fully review the other work to see that it is indeed the same idea and also not a load of crock. Depending on the subject, that might be a substantial time investment.
They fail to follow scientific ethics by refusing to cite pre-existing art, so that they can claim novelty for their methods.
How many times has this happened? The corporate labs are erasing independent contributors from scientific history, by falsifying it.
> How many times has this happened?
Not commenting on this specific case, but presenting your work as novel when there is a pile of pre-existing art is pretty common in ML/AI. Some of it is due to trying to get into conferences, but a fair share of it is also due to the sheer number of papers getting published. It can be legitimately difficult to read from the firehose of paper and understand whether your approach was explored in the last 5 years.
EDIT: Reading the blog and looking at the code, it does not pass the smell test for me, he wants them to cite an 8-month old GitHub package (no pre-print/published paper) with 19 stars? This is the equivalent of a patent troll for academic papers. The basic idea is not even novel, using judges to judge your judges goes back to at least a few years.
It is almost impossible to proactively find existing art conclusively. However, this wasn't my expectation in this case. I would just like them to correct the facts in their preprint, and add a citation which is missing. They refused to do that.
If you know a reference to an even more prior mention of meta-judges, please let me know. I am happy to add references to the repository.
Very typically authors write "to our knowledge novel method", which is fine, but in this case the authors cannot write even that if they know the method isn't novel now.
Is your objection to the word "Novel" or to the refusal to reference your work?
If they were not aware of your work, which is the only reasonable assumption, then their work is original and independent research. Almost all work is novel, unless you're arguing they have literally copied your work.
Would you be happy if they dropped that single word?
They would only need to cite you if you're a source. Unless they mention your work or results of your work you're not a source. It feels like you're just giving reviewer feedback that they should improve their introduction by giving more context, which is a quality of writing issue not an ethical one.
If they were to mention you the reader would assume they knew about your work before publication, and the next question would be "why haven't they compared their model to their sources"
Simultaneous publication happens all the time, and it's entirely possible for both papers to be novel. Asking the slower paper to redo work and rewrite just isn't practical, and could be a never ending treadmill.
It's not a never-ending treadmill because the past isn't being modified. It would be fine by me if they adapted the wording to be for example "we validate a method proposed by various authors before".
Of course I would appreciate a citation, but more than that I don't like false claims of novelty to become cemented into the body of scientific knowledge.
The authors are made aware of the project at the time of revising a pre-print, so not correcting the claims is immoral.
Edit:
The word "novel" in the context of scientific publication doesn't mean "new to the authors", it means "not previously published".
More information:
https://chatgpt.com/share/bf9e0de3-e05b-426c-b682-4ffa5f600f...
"we validate a method proposed by various authors before"
Does this mean you expect them to add additional analysis to their paper evaluating it against your unpublished work? That's what validating would involve.
I can see an argument for dropping the word novel, but it's a bit semantic as their approach is slightly different and your work isn't part of scientific literature.
I can't see how adding a sentence referencing your work would make sense as it didn't contribute to theirs, and they did not assess it. It would simply confuse. The omission of your work makes it clear they didn't know about it while doing theirs, which provides the accurate context.