Boxin Tang Suspected of Systematic Manipulating of the Publication Process of the Papers

This post is according to Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE) to report the systematic manipulation of peer review by Professor Boxin Tang of Simon Fraser University, Canada.

The original owner of the rotational method is Steinberg & D.K.J. Lin (2006) [Biometrika, 93,2, 279-288], whose results apply to the design for n=^k runs, where k=2^m(Theorem 3). Pang(2009) extends the above result from 2^k to p^d, where p is any prime number and d=2^c. Lin claims that her result applies to n^w, where n is positive integer, and w=2^c. C.D.Lin's work is not an independent result and is based on the just-contributed Pang (2009).

Tang (2009) only modifies one parameter of Steinberg (2006), and the paper was the isomorphism with Steinberg (2006). The second author of Pang (2009) is Minqian Liu, his friend is Boxin tang, who is the associate editor of Statistica Sinica.

In mid-December 2007, the paper by F. Pang, M.Q. Liu and D.K.J. Lin was submitted to Statistica Sinica [Vol.19 (2009), 1721-1728] (Pang (2009))。 After Tang got the manuscript, then immediately gave it to his doctoral student C.D.Lin. Lin then rewrote Pang (2009) and expanded them into her own main results. On January 30, 2008 C.D. Lin, R. Mukerjee and B. Tang submitted Lin(2009) to Biometrik. The writing of the article took about a month.

Reviewers can of course do further development on the basis of the original work. But it is unethical to use the results of an original work in a plagiarized manner and publish the original work before it has been published.

Lin (2009) is a rapid publication paper. The so-called fast publication is to purchase the page fee at a high price in exchange for simplifying the review process and lowering the acceptance threshold. The normal review period for Biometrika is 2-3 years. But the article only took a year. Its submission date was two years later than He (2009) and more than one month later than Pang (2009). The publication time was 8 months earlier than that of pang (2009), and was published at the same time as He (2009). Is there any reason for a student to pay a high price for the page fee to publish the article quickly? There are many problems in this article. We will not talk about other problems for the time being. The main problem is that the article is suspected of infringing on the three authors at the same time. Among them, only the authors of Pang (2009) were informed, and the other two were not. This paper violated He (2009) which under reviewin at the time, at least six places. My manuscript has been withheld for two years. Its most urgent task was to publish these OLHD & NOLH in Tables 1 and 2 in Section III before my manuscript was published. She said that these results were new. In fact, I had constructed them three years ago, but the manuscript was suppressed and could not be made public.

What role does Rahul Mukerjee play?

Boxin Tang and Rahul Mukerjee are both authors of Lin (2009) and associate editors of Annals of Statistics. Rahul Mukerjee was an associate editor at Biometrika. B.Tang used Rahul's fame and his position as an associate editor of Biometrika to exchange the second author's copyright for Rahul's help. To hide the truth, they collaborated to make up a story: "This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Center for Management and Development Studies, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta." Comparing the first page footnote of Lin (2010), the latter funding is definitely fake. Whether there are other transactions between them need to be investigated.

It is a routine that did not require a high IQ to recognize that B.Tang nominated his friends as the reviewer for Lin (2009) and Lin (2010),and performed by Rahul Mukerjee . Rahul Mukerjee was that "anonymous" associate editor. Both reviewers were close friends of B. Tang.

What role does Minqian Liu & Mingyao Ai play?

Liu Minqian (& Fang Pang) review Lin (2009) and B.Tang (& C.D.Lin) review Pang (2009), they approve each other's manuscripts at the same time, which does not need a routine that a high IQ can recognize. Lin (2010) is a full-text fake paper. First-year students in the mathematics department can recognize these errors. It is impossible for normal reviewers to not recognize these errors. Minqian Liu was also a reviewer of Lin (2010). In July 2010, Lin (2010) was just published, and M.Q. Liu came to SFU as a visiting scholar in August. This is no coincidence.

It was during this time that Liu collaborated with Yongdao Zhou to write "Experimental Design and Modeling", Among them, Section 5.6 of Chapter 5 "Uniform Experiment Design" introduces the random construction method for Uniform Table, Section 5.6.1 shows that its construction algorithm introduces Exchanging Method. and compared to Section 2.4.3 of Lin (2008), the two use the same exchanging method, whose exchange process and mechanism are exactly the same as He (2009) but different from that of Xu (2002). Liu's description is clear, unlike Lin excessive omission. "U is the matrix after exchanging two elements in a column of U_C." My original statement was "The result of exchanging the positions of components in any vector is another member of S_m." where S_m is the permutation set of elements of the vector. The third edition of the uniform design table was not constructed by the team itself, and the exchange method was introduced, so the fourth edition of the uniform design table was calculated by the team itself. Furthermore, the theory of uniform design has barely progressed from previous versions.

Because the optimization objective function MD is a much more complex expression than ρ². Its program running time increases rapidly as n increases, and the computation time required increases exponentially as the number of matrix columns increases. So, no significant progress compared to the third edition. The new version of the uniform design table in the appendix to Chapter 6, there is no evidence that these results have any clear advantage in uniformity over a zero-correlation design or OLHD.

Experimental Design and Modeling was published in June 2011. When was it written? When did the programming, debugging and calculation of these tables start and when was it completed? What I can be sure of is that it must not be the result of Liu's visit to SFU, and the writing plan was formed after 2006. There is a long-term partnership between them. I can't help but suspect that Prof. Minqian Liu is a reviewer of Lin (2009) and Lin (2010).

Mingyao Ai was a reviewer of Lin (2010), and the actual reviewer is his student Yuanzhen He, who graduated from the university in 2006. At the time of the review, she had graduated from university only two years ago. Then Y.Z. He was a postdoctoral fellow at B.Tang of SFU for a year.

According to the above analysis, Boxin Tang to manipulate the peer review process， relies heavily on two Chinese professors, Mingyao Ai and Minqian Liu, I can't help but suspect that at least one of them is a reviewer of my manuscript He (2009). That is, the person who gave my manuscript to Boxin Tang. Among them, Minqian Liu is the most likely.