Posted on 03/18/2021 9:34:32 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Camille Noûs first appeared on the research scene 1 year ago, as a signatory to an open letter protesting French science policy. Since then, Noûs has been an author on 180 journal papers, in fields as disparate as astrophysics, molecular biology, and ecology, and is racking up citations.
But Noûs is not a real person. The name—intentionally added to papers, sometimes without the knowledge of journal editors—is meant to personify collective efforts in science and to protest individualism, according to RogueESR, a French research advocacy group that dreamed up the character.
RogueESR had a subversive idea: What if they slipped a fictitious researcher in their author lists? “Hundreds of articles will make this name the top author on the planet,” they wrote in a newsletter, “with the consequence of distorting certain bibliometric statistics and demonstrating the absurdity of individual quantitative assessment.”
Some authors, like Lansberg, did not inform editors that Noûs is not a real person. A spokesperson for Scientific Reports told Science that “concerns have been raised” about authorship on a paper in the journal that lists Noûs, and the journal is investigating. And a paper in Physical Review B has published a correction stating that the inclusion of Noûs’s name was contrary to journal policy, and that it had been removed.
In one case, a group of mathematicians committed to the idea of Noûs chose to withdraw a paper from consideration at the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A after the editorial board decided Noûs could not be included. In another case, an editor at Solar Physics declined to allow the submission of Noûs papers, citing the authorship standards recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics, which require every author to make substantial contributions to the work and to take responsibility for its contents.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
“did I say third person?”
Yes. First person plural. But there’s no circumflex û as far as I remember.
France headed back to the good old anti-science days
According to the Internet, “Noûs” with the circumflex and sometimes without, is the romanization of the name of one of the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece. It is not the French pronoun.
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Je sui no parlais Francais
Vraiment.
Even that doesn't work because the word Russe in French is the word for Russian.
Is there a French word ‘ruze’?
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