PLAGIARISM WORKSHOP, CAPE TOWN
WORLD BOOK AND COPYRIGHT DAY - 23 APRIL 2010
The audience attending the workshop held at iKhaya lodge
In celebration of World Book and Copyright day, ANFASA held a workshop that dealt with plagiarism. The workshop sought to provide a discussion around this topic by getting panellists across the spectrum who encounter it in their respective fields. The chair to the panel was author, poet and BookSA editor, Liesl Jobson and the panellists where; Lee-Ann Tong (academic author), Sandy Shepherd (publisher) and Owen Dean (copyright attorney).
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Liesl began by stressing that "if there is one thing that is profoundly emotive and disturbing it is the accusation of plagiarism. It is the thing that shames people, embarrasses publishers, it ruins careers in the academy and in the literary circles. Is it photographic memory? Is it how many of us operate? synthesizing concepts, information, what we’ve heard and regurgitating it, is it as simple as that? This is not an issue that can be quickly or lightly, or fundamentally or simplistically unpacked." |
| Lee-Ann Tong, an intellectual property law lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT), started off by maintaining that she doesn't have the definitive answer about plagiarism but she has enforced plagiarism laws at UCT and has written as an academic author. So she defined plagiarism as taking someone else’s work and passing it on as your own. Then she went on to give more insight into plagiarism: |
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Most students don’t understand the severity of the act, you take someone else work because you don’t know what you are doing, or you are plain lazy because there is too much information on the web and you are under pressure to deliver. Academic authors also plagiarise for the same reasons but in addition to that there is the “publish or perish” sword so you have to teach, research, do administrative work and also publish. So you have to publish to be promoted and this forces you to go to the internet copy and paste in a haste to get publications.
It is taking of someone’s work and passing it as your own. If you are answerable to an academic authority for the kind of work that you produce, then it’s important to understand what this is. Then this brings about the question of intention. Some policies say intention isn’t an issue or requirement at all. This has serious ramifications if you want to keep a job or stay in the institution.
The problem is that if intention isn’t necessary then all sorts of conduct may fall foul of plagiarism. E.g innocent plagiarism of a student will find him before a disciplinary committee. The issue of whether or not intention is necessary is important because when the student or staff member is found guilty it goes onto the academic record. The way in which the levels of plagiarism are dealt with will be in terms of the sanctions imposed so e.g if you are a first year student you will have to write an essay on plagiarism and if you are PhD student then there might be some justification on why it happened but the difficulty is that the innocent person becomes a victim. So if intention is kept an ingredient you will end up with so many innocent people carrying that stamp.
This is difficult to figure out but the key elements are:
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There must be a publication
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Content in work should be someone else
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No acknowledgement
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Some students take someone else paper and hand it in or buy a paper off the internet.
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verbatim copying and no acknowledgment
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same text with footnote but no quotation marks
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same text no quotation marks
- several quotes lumped in single footnote with no proper references (question on whether this should be punishable because it amounts to sloppiness)
- paraphrasing (this is the more difficult one) — it is still plagiarism but problematic where someone continuously paraphrases. Both students and academic authors do it. Few weeks ago I had to peer review something on Cyberlaw plagiarism. What bothered me was the language use which suddenly changed to American e.g phrases like “fair use”. As I continued to google stuff in it I found out that most of it was verbatim plagiarised. When people peer review, an extra check isn’t made and in most cases so much goes through that is in fact plagiarised.
This happens when you re-use your work. This could happen when you send the manuscript to two publishers at the same time and sometimes it is not sneaky. This tends to be seen by others as re-cycling fraud as opposed to plagiarism, since this is where you send the same or substantially the same manuscript to a number of places and you get credit from all those various places. This is looked at as unethical. For example this will happen in a scenario where you have a specific area of interest e.g tax law, you have the same ideas that you use over and over again in different articles. That is when it becomes a bit more difficult because there is no guideline in most universities whether or not you can self plagiarise. Also there will be copyright infringement where the works have been submitted to different publishers and the publisher owns the copyright. So for academics who do a lot of legitimate recycling it starts to become very muddy and autoplagiarism/self-plagiarism seems to be gaining a lot of popularity. The key thing is that when it becomes misrepresentation then perhaps you need to start sanctioning it. For example if you say on the outset that this is based on the earlier work that you have done then it shouldn’t be problematic but if you pretend that it is original being published for the first time then yes that becomes unethical.
As an institution, plagiarism policies are put in place and it sounds nice but in practice it is extremely difficult to police. The other way is software used to detect plagiarism and the programme should pick up on similar work but these programmes don’t work very well because they pick up all sorts of things that are not plagiarism e.g a stack of a bibliography. Peer review will be another way to do this but this cannot be enforced across the board because you can’t force the dodgy academic down the corridor to put his work through peer review. What makes this harsh in academia is that sanctions are very steep — expelled if you are a student as a staff member you can be dismissed but there is also the stigma that hangs over you.
If it includes unintentional copying then you might not have a defence but the possible ways of countering it is that try to show that there is no dishonest use which takes you back to the way your institution defines plagiarism. So if it is defined as academic dishonesty then one has to define if inadvertent plagiarism does away with dishonesty.
Also sometimes an academic uses what is in the public domain, not the copyright public domain, but the common knowledge domain that is different authors and sources over a long period of time and you can’t really cite everyone who has mentioned this idea however, there might be certain specific theories that can be traced back to a particular person then you can obviously acknowledge that.
Sometimes you can claim simultaneous inspiration, we are all working on a similar subject and come up with the same thread of ideas.
N.B
One more thing to think about is the question of textbooks because that affects many authors. It is extremely difficult because the textbook is not authored to be original it is an accumulation of everything that has gone before, it is also intended for a particular audience and different levels e.g school, tertiary. So the difficulty is that there are only limited ways in which you can say the same thing i.e there are only certain key words that you can use and we are all bound to come up with something very similar.
In closing in academia the problem is that you are building on so it becomes hard because you are paid to publish and you are penalized for plagiarism so you begin to write defensively and that detracts from the writing process. Then you have the old maxim that says: “copying from one source is plagiarism and copying from several is research.”
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Sandy Shepherd is the editorial manager at Juta & Co. and she spoke about plagiarism from a publisher's point of view i.e how plagiarism affects publishers from a business point of view and how they guard against it.
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According to Sandy there is a fair amount of overlap when it comes to plagiarism in the different fields. She couldn’t afford to talk about plagiarism without talking about copyright infringement. "Plagiarism is using someone else work without crediting that person and passing it off as your own. Copyright infringement says that it is using a substantial amount of someone’s work without permission, it applies to text, as well as artwork, photographs and copyright exist for lifetime of the author plus 50yrs. The question is what is a substantial part? |
So how do we protect ourselves against copyright infringement? Most publishers include an indemnity and warranty clause in the contract where the author makes an undertaking that he has not plagiarised nor infringed any existing copyright. Despite having the contract spelling this out it is still a problem particularly given the internet’s availability Wikipedia etc. the abundance of information on the internet and the viability of sources makes it all too easy to do that. We just had a case where an editor was working on an author’s manuscript and when doing checks discovered that portions of text had been copied verbatim and when carrying out a through search discovered that several tracks of text had been used verbatim and this was the work of an experienced academic who had seen and signed the contract. Whether or not you are using substantial parts please acknowledge the source otherwise its plagiarism. That is why at university the whole culture of referencing is instilled. The problem is that during note taking people get sloppy. In the process of research people start taking sentences that are not theirs and days, weeks, months later it becomes difficult to remember that it wasn’t you who wrote those words.
This is where as a publisher your editor has to be vigilant, editors have to look closely and usually they notice when the style changes, and then they should start probing, some editor familiar with the subject start to recognise sentences that they have read elsewhere. Lee-Ann Tong spoke about institutions’ policies and this is clearly important that they set it out. Wits has something on plagiarism on its website and e.g not putting someone else words in quotation marks is plagiarism. Paraphrasing someone else words, discussing a theory you don’t need permission to quote but must acknowledge the author. Using the ideas of others results in disciplinary hearings, suspension or expulsion.
In the fiction world I am sure you remember the case of Pamela Jooste accused by Lindsay Bremner of having copied from her work. In the end Jooste admitted to copying sections of the work which amounted to more than 400 words and apologized to Lindsay Bremner. But was that sufficient? What does that do to you? Your reputation? In the end Jooste’s publisher decided not to withdraw the book but I don’t know how much sales were affected but it can be potentially damaging.
On the issue of self plagiarism, which Lee-Ann Tong alluded to, in academic publishing if you choose to use a chapter in a previous book you should ask for permission particularly if it was published by a different publisher. And as a publisher we have to consider the issue of a competing title i.e are students going to buy the two books or will they comfortably replace one with the other. We might agree for the author to re-use the same chapter if we published both but then it must state clearly that it has appeared before in this other book.
The other way we try to prevent plagiarism will be through the peer review process. It is a practice that two reviewers look at the manuscript and such issues will come up there.
Referencing means giving the source of work one or other accepted forms. Whatever the format, text reference must include the name of the author and year. Source attribution for a table or diagram must be below the page this will be followed by complete reference in the bibliography. If the author of the work is long dead you may use the work without getting permission but you must still acknowledge the source otherwise it is plagiarism.
The local famous accusation of plagiarism will be the Antjie Krog and Stephen Watson saga. In 2004 Antjie Krog published a book of poems and two years later she was accused of lifting the concept of her work from Watson’s book which he published in 1991. Both books are poetry anthologies. Watson claimed that Krog was guilty of theft and plagiarism of his work. The point is they both worked on the same source, which was a late 19th century transcription. The original work used was clearly in the public domain so Krog could use the material without infringing any copyright and the likelihood in the choice of wording between the works being similar was very great and this is what Watson was accusing her of, of using the same poems that he chose in his earlier work. Krog quite correctly acknowledged her source, she lists the originators’ poems. In her introduction to the book she describes how she came about to write, she even divides the poems and gives a short biography on the originators so there is no doubt where the originals come from. On the LitNet webpage in 2006 she responds to the accusation as follows “it’s a bit like an accusation of plagiarism by Walt Disney studios for making poems out of the stories of the brothers Grimm.” The last heard of this matter was Krog’s publishers threatening to take legal action for defamation.
So in wrapping up it is clear that in fiction and non-fiction authors have a moral obligation to acknowledge where the information comes from, not to do so is very damaging to their reputation and credibility. As far as publishers are concerned our reputation is tainted if we accept and publish plagiarised work even if we still have a clause in the contract protecting ourselves."
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Owen Dean is a member of ANFASA and a copyright consultant at Spoor & Fisher and he spoke about the differences between plagiarism and copyright infringement and what authors need to understand. He addressed the whole issue from a legal point of view. "The starting point being that copyright infringement is a legal concept, it is a legal issue.
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The Copyright Act gives protection to a category of different works including literary works and to these categories it has an itemised list of activities listed in the Copyright Act referred to as restricted acts, for literary work you have publication, reproduction, adaptations etc and you infringe copyright when you do one of these acts without permission from the copyright owner for any substantial part to this work. What would constitutes any substantial part is one of the greatest mysteries of copyright law it’s a subjective issue and it really lies within the discretion of a judge hearing a case whether the line has been crossed. It is a very elastic term and this makes it difficult when trying to advise clients on copyright infringement. So if you take something which is very small in relation to the whole but has an essential characteristic then it amounts to copyright infringement.
When copyright is infringed the remedy is that you can take action against the infringer civil or in some cases criminal action. However, when we come to plagiarism it isn’t a legal term but an ethical issue, and what constitutes plagiarism depends on the environment that you are operating in. That environment would make it constitute improper conduct. All the definitions I have read emphasise a couple of points which are that you are misrepresenting someone else ideas or work as your own, you are passing off what you are putting forward as being your own work, its normally done intentionally and some have described it as a type of fraud. In legal terms as opposed to academic, intention is an aspect of plagiarism. Reproduction is the essence of both copyright infringement as well as plagiarism, there is quite a bit of overlap between the two. There are instances where plagiarism will be copyright infringement. Some people even start off from that point that they are one and the same thing and plagiarism is just a layman’s term for copyright infringement but that is not correct because they don’t overlap completely. Copyright protects the material expression of ideas it does not protect the ideas per se. You are perfectly free from a copyright point of view to go and read somebody else work, adopt the ideas and write them in your own way and process them in your own words etc and that wont be infringing copyright because copyright infringement is the way the ideas are expressed. The emphasis is on the material expression of the work. Plagiarism on the other hand goes as far as saying that you can plagiarise even if you take ideas, so it is much broad and it is quite frightening from a copyright lawyer’s point of view that even ideas are protected in terms of the concepts of plagiarism. Some examples where copyright infringement will happen and there is no plagiarism is piracy, here the infringer takes verbatim every thing. He tries to say he is making the whole original product and trying to fool you that it is his original product so you will have copyright infringement by reproduction without plagiarism. Where you have plagiarism but no infringement you could have someone who comes forward with the words of Shakespeare or a slight variation to them and that will be plagiarism without copyright infringement because from a copyright point of view his works are in the public domain. Consequences of copyright infringement as I mentioned can make you legally liable for a lot of things. However, from a legal point of view, subject to one slight variation, which I will come back to, plagiarism will seldom have a legal effect. One could look to the law of passing off in some circumstances or fraud in other circumstances but those will be extreme cases of plagiarism so it comes back to the point that it is an ethical issue and not legal. There is in my view one aspect where plagiarism could give rise to legal recourse and this will be in relation to what is provided in the Copyright Act as moral rights. The two forms to it are the right to paternity (right to be identified as the author) and the right to integrity (right not to have your work mutilated or distorted) so if something is plagiarised the author is entitled to come around and say that I am designated to be the author of that work and that right to paternity is then enforced, you can claim an interdict damages, remedies etc."
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