Plagiarism: A Growing Concern In Scientific Community
Let us first of all know about plagiarism and how it is different from copyright piracy. Plagiarism word is derived from Latin word plagiaries which mean stealing someone else’s work1. According to oxford dictionaries its literal meaning is “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own”2. Wikipedia defines plagiarism as “the wrongful appropriation and purloining and publication of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work”1. The word plagiarism is different from copyright piracy3. Copyright piracy is unauthorised doing anything, the exclusive right to do which is with copyright owner or reproduction, sale or hiring in any form4,5 whereas plagiarism is the failure of giving credit to original author5 but both are infringements of copyright (under Indian Copyright Act, 1957) and hence crime. Unauthorised reproduction, sale or hiring is not infringement of copyright after expiry of the copyright protection period which varies nation-wise (minimum requirement under Berne Convention is 50 years and 60 years in case of India, post mortem of copyright owner) but under author’s moral rights his authorship and control over the work is forever and no one can represent it as his/her own original work6. If someone is doing so it would be plagiarism and hence serious ethical offense and crime.
CrossCheck: an effective tool for detecting plagiarism
The plagiarism detection service CrossCheck has been used since October 2008 as part of the paper reviewing process for the Journal of Zhejiang University – Science (A & B). Between October 2008 and May 2009 662 papers were CrossChecked; 151 of these (around 22.8% of submitted papers) were found to contain apparently unreasonable levels of copying or self‐plagiarism, and 25.8% of these cases (39 papers) gave rise to serious suspicions of plagiarism and copyright infringement. Four types of copying or plagiarism were identified, in an attempt to reach a consensus on this type of academic misconduct.
An operational method for estimating signal to noise ratios from data acquired with imaging spectrometers
A method, using the concept of local means and local standard deviations of small imaging blocks and using a box counting procedure, has been developed for unsupervised estimation of the average signal to noise ratios of images in which the noise is additive. The method has been applied to simulated images with Gaussian noise, to images acquired with the Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer and with the Geophysical and Environmental Research Imaging Spectrometer. The method is compared with other techniques for estimating signal to noise ratios from imaging data. It is believed that the method is generally applicable to images having many small homogeneous blocks. Because the method does not take into account interband effects, it is not appropriate to use the method to estimate signal to noise ratios from images having nonnegligible interband radiometric calibration errors at spatial scales less than or equal to the size of the small imaging blocks used in the noise estimation.