iThenticate Blog

Plagiarism and integrity continue to be areas of concern on academic, research and publishing levels.  We had the pleasure of speaking with Peter LaPlaca who is the editor of Industrial Marketing Management (IMM), a journal published by Elsevier, and a global seminar speaker, promoting ethics. During this audio interview, Mr. LaPlaca discusses various types of issues he and other editors encounter (some are rather surprising), best practices for how editors can handle submissions that contain plagiarism, and how giving students the proper guidance can make a world of difference when it comes to publishing success.

In November, the case of University of Regina professor Shahid Azam became a national story and the subject of multiple articles on the CBC and elsewhere.

While plagiarism in the classrooms is a widely-discussed topic, it’s not always the students who have issues with copied content, sometimes its the educational materials that either contain plagiarism or are the victim of plagiarism.

One widely-known example involved Theresa Cameron, a former professor at the College of Design at Arizona State University. Despite over ten years with the college and having been awarded Tenure, the school terminated her, in a controversial decision, over alleged plagiarism in six syllabi.

As the 2014 election comes to a close, it has been an election cycle ripe with plagiarism stories. The stories included Democratic Senator John Walsh being forced out of his election after a plagiarism scandal and Republican Senate candidate, Dr. Monica Wehby, being accused of plagiarizing her health care and economic plans from other Republican sources.

A pair of political plagiarism scandals have shined a light on the roles of consultants and employees in political campaigns and plagiarism, or at least alleged plagiarism, by them can negatively impact a campaign.

While many renowned plagiarists end up never making a return to their field, such as Jayson Blair and Kaavya Viswanathan, others do find forgiveness and wind up making a return, including Jonah Lehrer and Annette Schavan.

Previously, we looked at the divisions growing in the open access community and an overview as to what Creative Commons is and how it applies to academic research. However, all of this points to a much larger question: Why is copyright in research such an important issue for research?To understand this, we first have to look at what copyright is and then how it applies to research and why that application is crucial.

The role of intellectual property in research has long been a divisive issue. Whether it’s questions of who owns patents based upon academic research or who holds the copyright in the research itself, researchers have often dealt with clashes between ideals about furthering knowledge in a field and the economic realities about funding and publishing research.

However, as the open access movement has grown, copyright has been particularly thrust into the spotlight. This has become especially important as divisions over which copyright license(s) to use have caused rifts among publishers and funders.