My Stolen R Google Scholar Account has been Stolen From Me!!

For my own stupid amusement in 2014 I created a Google Scholar account for the R programming language and blogged about it.  If you read that post, you'll see I mostly did it because I find it hilarious how many published papers screw up R's citation (probably including some of my own :).  

Now, to be totally clear, I've never contributed a single thing to the development of R and I'm not at all associated with the project.  I'm simply a fan who noticed it gets cited a lot and thought it could be interesting to give it a presence on Google Scholar.  So did I have any credible authority to appropriate this account?  Of course not.  Or at least I had no more right than any of the other ~7 billion humans on earth who never contributed to R.  Was it ethical of me to do this?  Let's call that a grey area.  On the one hand, it gave R some presence, but on the other hand, I controlled the account, which I'll admit is a little awkward.

So why am I writing this?  Well, as you can probably guess from the title, the account appears to have been taken away from me.  Silently taken away, I might add.  I'm not sure when, because I honestly haven't checked on it in years.  If you go to the account now, it links to CRAN as a homepage, and says that the email address associated with the account is registered to a Canadian University. Generally things seem above board, and probably this is the right, just, and equitable conclusion of my little spoof.  

I think the only remaining interest here is how did someone at that Canadian University convince Google to turn over the account?  And was it easier to do it that way than to simply email me?

So, chastened, I think I will no longer create novelty Google Scholar accounts.  Certainly not for the living (be they people or projects).  That said, if you are interested, I noticed that many notable deceased scientists, like Fisher, Pearson, Snedecor, Tukey, Lush, Haldane, or Henderson do not have accounts. That's a shame.