Comment by AshamedCaptain
4 years ago
Researcher sends bogus papers to journal/conference, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the journal is => GREAT JOB, PEER REVIEW SUCKS!
Researcher sends bogus patches to bazaar-style project, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the project is => DON'T DO THAT! BAD RESEARCHER, BAD!
One potentially misleads readers of the journal, the other introduces security vulnerabilities into the world’s most popular operating system kernel.
"Misleading readers of a journal" might actually cause more damages to all of humanity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt) than inserting a security vulnerability (that is likely not even exploitable) in a driver that no one actually enables (which is likely why no one cares about reviewing patches to it, either).
Thought to be fair, it is also the case that only the most irrelevant journals are likely to accept the most bogus papers. But in both cases I see no reason not to point it out.
The two situations are much more closer than what you think. The only difference I see is in the level of bogusness.
OK? If somebody else does something ethically dubious, does that make all ethically dubious behaviours acceptable somehow? How does a totally separate instance of ethical misconduct impact this situation?