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.
Shifting boundaries of intellectual property: Authors and publishers negotiating the WWW
Abstract The World Wide Web explosion has unsettled strategic relations of power between academic authors and publishers. These disruptions provide an opportunity to reconceptualize those relations and influence future practices. By examining the divergent ways publishers and authors have thought about knowledge and its dissemination, since the 19th century, we reveal the motivations, goals, standards and perceptions of each group. Foucault explained that traditionally, authors have provided particular functions: to classify texts, to establish relationships among texts within their sociocultural contexts, and to identify bodies of work. However the roles of authors, as demonstrated in Web culture, ore shifting dramatically, thereby enabling new functions to emerge. The emerging innovative methods of text distribution and attribution are challenging the way knowledge itself is produced and distributed within particular disciplines. We meet this challenge by drawing on the interdisciplinary work of Steven Harnad (psychology), Bernard Hibbitts (law), Deborah Halbert (law), and Paul Ginsparg (physics) to examine a new authoring in which a fluid archive is drawing “author and reader communities—together” (Ginsparg, 1996, p. 5). We retheorize the relationship between authors and publishers to set the stage for collaboration and negotiation. Our revised definition of Foucault's author-function blurs the boundaries between publishers and academic authors, allowing print and digital publication to peacefully coexist in this late age of print.