Dear friends of ISCA,

The month of June has been an active month for many of us. In the last ISCApad, I highlighted the work of the Technical Programme Committee of Interspeech 2022, and of the organizers who are dedicated to make Interspeech an excellent experience for you. This month, I would like to highlight the activities of individuals which are more hidden.

As all scientists, you as a member of our scientific community expect a high-quality scientific program from your favorite Interspeech conference. With good justification, you expect that papers are novel, that authors highlight their original ideas, and that they clearly distinguish from the state-of-the-art. Expert review is a key to ensure high quality. However, as fora for publishing papers – even without any review system – abound, and as the need for quick success sometimes outperforms desired quality, we need to be more careful in tracing the origin of papers. Tools for detecting plagiarism are a valuable mean to facilitate our work. Still, the processes – also within ISCA – are not yet optimum. This year, the Ethics Committee, led by Tatsuya Kawahara, has checked more than 70 Interspeech submissions which were pre-filtered by such tools and identified as suspicious. In some cases, the degree of overlap with existing (and mostly uncited) work was so large that the committee decided to not only reject the paper under consideration, but also all other papers submitted by the same authors. Also a ban from participating in ISCA-related events was issued. Whereas many of the authors understand the concerns and apologize for behaving against the ISCA Code-of-Conduct, others are less respectful.

I would like to use this opportunity as a reminder for the rules ISCA has established: The ISCA Code of Ethics for Authors highlights the dos and dont’s authors have to follow in order to make their contributions clear. The ISCA Code of Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees defines a set of principles we all have to follow in order to enable a pleasurable and valuable experience for all members of our community; unfortunately also these guidelines are not followed by all. The ISCA Ethics Committee follows up on incidences reported, but also proactively advocates the installation of processes to prevent unethical behavior to happen. My sincere gratitude goes to Tatsuya Kawahara and his committee for their important work, oftentimes happening in the background.

Other than this, there is a mixture of sad and promising news in this month’s newsletter, as always kindly compiled by Christian Wellekens. I wish you all a good summer, and a good read!

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President