Academic fraud and GMP

Torbjorn Granlund tg at gmplib.org
Sun Oct 11 12:45:33 CEST 2009


Dear GMP users and developers,

It has come to my attention that several research results related to GMP
as well as GMP itself are being claimed by people that has not been
involved in the original research.

A fundamental ethical obligation for everybody is to give due credit.
But for a researcher, this obligation is not simply about ethics, it is
fundamental to our career and our reputation as credible researchers.
It is also fundamental to get proper credit for your work, as citations
are used in research evaluations.

GMP is released under a Free Software license which gives rights for
people to disseminate the code, modify it, etc, and then pass on the
resulting sources under a compatible license.  There is no clause about
giving credit, except that those receiving the original work or any form
of derived work must be told their rights.

This does not mean that a researcher does not have obligations about
giving credit.  GMP's license is a completely orthogonal issue.

I would like to ask GMP users and developers to help the GMP project to
find examples where people in a research context use GMP or code derived
from GMP without giving due credit, or even claim or imply they wrote
GMP themselves.  Please also tell us about legal abuses that you
suspect.  You don't need to be sure there is a problem before you mail
us, we will evaluate each case which we are told about.

Do not send the information to a public mailing list.  Please send it to
me, privately, using tg at gmplib.org.  If you save evidence of the
problem, that might also be useful.

Thanks for your help!

-- 
Torbjörn


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