Nowadays, it is very common to see medical researchers using pirated SPSS software and reporting in the material and methods part SPSS software used. Actually they have used pirated SPSS software. What action will be taken against these malpractice. Will their publication retracted for this reason because SPSS already informed in the licence agreement that researcher should not use their software name, when it is pirated. I feel the authors should taken care of this as equivalent to ethical clearance. Otherwise they will come under black listed by the authorities and universities.
I have worked in many universities in the far east where internal computer infrastructures were poor and in their departments different versions of software (MSOffice, SPSS etc.) were available on different machines as well as many viruses. Some machines had 5-6 versions of SPSS on the one hard-drive - all pirate copies.
There are many things to consider here, from the point of view of Software providers their software is in demand, especially by university students and widely used by both students and academics the world over (same also applies presumably to Business)
From the point of view of educational institutions they are constantly needing to update software and pay license fees, make software available to staff and students (more cost) - SPSS is now on version 22 and researchers now more advanced research needs to also utilize AMOS (AMOS 22 for SPSS 22, AMOS 21 for SPSS 21......etc) and the flexibility is (deliberately some would say) limited especially if have a Mac - No AMOS!!!!
Are we to penalise students or researchers in those situations or countries whose institutions cannot afford license fees or do not have infrastructure, because they use pirated software to write up and generate analyses for assessments or output, dissertations, theses? Similarly are we to penalise the staff of those institutions for generating conference papers and articles or teaching with such software (if they have nothing else)? - In that event there are countless thousands of far eastern students would have to have their degrees, Masters degrees and doctrates taken from them?
I know where my morality and ethical considerations lie in such situations.
I would encourage them to use open source alternatives. There are so many. R is more famous than SPSS and is free as in speech. And recently, iPython is released, which might eventually replace big-shots like matlab and mathematica.
It doesn't answer your question though. I think the main problem would be you never know for sure if the software they used was pirated or not.
This is part of ethics also. Not using legal software is dangerous. If a mistake happens you can not blame none else. But in practice how can we know about it/?
How can somebody make such allegations?! I don't think there is any regulation to trace the authenticity of software used by researchers!
It will depend on the policy or guidelines of the Journal. I believe it will be very difficult for them to really run after such users because as I understand it, researchers do not publish SPSS outputs directly, they either copy paste the outputs or edit them in Word file.
I have worked in many universities in the far east where internal computer infrastructures were poor and in their departments different versions of software (MSOffice, SPSS etc.) were available on different machines as well as many viruses. Some machines had 5-6 versions of SPSS on the one hard-drive - all pirate copies.
There are many things to consider here, from the point of view of Software providers their software is in demand, especially by university students and widely used by both students and academics the world over (same also applies presumably to Business)
From the point of view of educational institutions they are constantly needing to update software and pay license fees, make software available to staff and students (more cost) - SPSS is now on version 22 and researchers now more advanced research needs to also utilize AMOS (AMOS 22 for SPSS 22, AMOS 21 for SPSS 21......etc) and the flexibility is (deliberately some would say) limited especially if have a Mac - No AMOS!!!!
Are we to penalise students or researchers in those situations or countries whose institutions cannot afford license fees or do not have infrastructure, because they use pirated software to write up and generate analyses for assessments or output, dissertations, theses? Similarly are we to penalise the staff of those institutions for generating conference papers and articles or teaching with such software (if they have nothing else)? - In that event there are countless thousands of far eastern students would have to have their degrees, Masters degrees and doctrates taken from them?
I know where my morality and ethical considerations lie in such situations.
As on date, there is no way to detect the authenticity of a software used. Many of the software like SPSS are not affordable to students and are to be procured by the institutes. As long as the results are not mutilated, no action can be taken.
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