Perhaps a strange title for a post, but I was recently kindly alerted by Luis-Manuel Garcia at the University of Chicago that a certain dissertation writing "service" has been aggregating and re-posting material from blogs that feature the word "dissertation".
As my professional reputation in academic circles could rest upon a Google search, I wanted this post to come up indicating that I absolutely deplore these outfits which do nothing to advance scholarship and are typical of individuals who can see only the end-goal of education as employment. "If I can fake the results, I can do better for myself". I am in no way affiliated to this service. It gets its material by automated scanning of websites. Because I license my work under a CC-BY license, there is nothing I can do to stop them reproducing this material. This is the price I am willing to pay to ensure the material I write is freely available for dissemination, but I wanted you, dear reader, to be aware of how my work arrived there.
The cynics may say: "ha, trusting fool, look how you were used for your naivety". Well, perhaps, but I still believe the benefits of openness outweigh the downsides. More people might see the original article, now, even if they come to it through an abhorrent source.
Featured image by Thomas Hawk under a CC-BY-NC license.