I just finished reading an article entitled “CSI: Plagarism” by M. Garrett Bauman in the latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 9, 2009, D20, The Chronicle Review). It focused on plagiarism by students and its damaging consequences on the integrity of education. The author describes his classroom experiences with a couple of his students. The Internet has contributed significantly to the proliferation of plagiarism by students, regardless of their motivations and rationales.
Let's shift targets for a few paragraphs. What about faculty, administrators, and other professionals who are under the gun to produce articles, chapters, books, conference presentations, e-zines, blogs, and other written products? The same temptations available to students are also available to our unscrupulous and evil colleagues. How do you protect your intellectual property? Once our work is published, most of us assume it’s protected by copyright and that’s it. We neither have the time nor inclination to investigate CSI-style whether anybody has stolen our work.
However, the rules of the game have changed markedly with Internet access. Virtually everyone in cyberspace has access to everything we write. Google your name and you will find papers you wrote decades ago pop up. You’d be amazed.
(Personal Sidebar: Over my career, I’ve had my books stolen from university libraries, sections of articles plagiarized, punch lines in my bio appearing in other faculty bios, and, most recently, one of my blogs stolen verbatim as someone else’s blog. As a writer, my first response is usually “Hummm. It’s nice to know someone finds value in my work to risk fines, imprisonment, and an almost certain torturous and excruciatingly painful death.” Not exactly. Although swiping my work provides a sense of validation that’s more flattering than the peer review process, it's also a feeling of personal violation. That makes me angry. Seeing my blog 2 weeks ago on a blog site with someone else’s name under it made me furious. End of Bloated Sidebar.) So what’s the solution?
Please share your plagiarism experiences involving your work. What do you do to minimize violations?
My next blog will reveal how to track down the perp and prevent future violations. Don’t miss it.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
Arrrrgh! I feel your pain! Years ago, I reviewed an article for a prestigious medical journal--which looked oddly familiar. Since it was a holiday weekend, I set it aside and returned to read it. Deju vu, all over again. The authors (2 assistant professors) had stolen my published abstract from a national meeting and used it as the first 2 pages of "their" article--without a single quote, citation, or reference. I was livid, and let the editor know. When confronted, I'm told they said it was an "oversight." I have no idea if it impacted their tenure and promotion, but it should have. These are our students role models???
ReplyDelete