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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

Given that this conference hasn't happened yet, there should still be time for the affected people to report the inappropriate conduct to the organizers and possibly get the paper pulled.

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FYI .. many ACM conferences are now asking explicitly if an IRB was required, and if so, was it received. This does not prevent researchers from saying IRB doesn't apply, but perhaps it can be caught during peer review.

Btw .. I posted a few times on the thread, and want to acknowledge that researchers are humans, and humans do make mistakes. Thankfully in this case, the direct consequence was time wasted, and this is a teaching moment for all involved. In my humble opinion, the researchers should acknowledge in stronger terms they screwed up, do a post-mortem on how this happened, and everyone (including the researchers) should move on with their lives.

The same group did the same thing last year (that's what the paper is about - may 2021 paper obviously got written/submitted last year), when the preprint got published they got criticized publicly. And now they are doing it again, so its not just a matter of "acknowledge they screwed up".

Given current academia which puts a significant negative on discussing why research failed, I doubt your idea of post-mortems, public or private, will gain any traction.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/732/why-dont-re.... seems to list out reasons why not to do postmortems

There are some venues, e.g. this Asplos workshop: https://nope.pub/

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