Plagiarism Risks on Academic Websites

[Jon Knight]

On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, Terry Huwe wrote:
> I talked this over with my Director (she's a labor economist), and she
> thinks that students who are not yet on the job market, but soon will be,
> are naturally concerned with preserving their intellectual work as they
> launch their careers.  This is less of a concern for established academics,
> because they become known in their research areas and it's more difficult to
> plagiarize. 

I started putting stuff I was doing online soon after I started my PhD
(initially via FTP, then gopher and then the Web).  At the time I was
about the only person in my department doing this (the UK academic network
had only just joined the Internet so there wasn't an anon-FTP culture
amongst the staff at the time) and people constantly asked me if I was
worried about plagarism.  The answer was no, because most of the things I
put online were either electronic copies of departmental technical reports
or software which I announced far and wide.

Because I put the TRs online _after_ I'd registered them with the
department, if anyone did come along and copy my work I could still point
out at a viva that I was there first and the department's TR creation
dates would back me up.  Also as the software was announced on mailing
lists run by third parties with archives, I could point to those if
needed.  As it turned out, I never had any problems related to plagarism
(though I did have to steer my research around a couple of surprise
announcements of similar work, but the guys doing that had been doing the
work for some years and it was just the usual bad luck/not knowing the
field as well as I should). 

Also I believe that having stuff online _helped_ me get jobs as people
could see what sort of things I was upto.  I started getting job offers
well before getting my doctorate based on resources I'd put online and my
contributions to mailing lists, etc.  Certainly one of my jobs now is a
direct result of someone seeing me on a mailing list and then following up
some of my work online ('cos he told me so!).

The real danger is writing a paper that lets people know what you're about
to do rather than what you've just done.  However this isn't a problem
with electronic distribution; this is a problem that occurs whenever you
write papers.  And I view learning how to communicate what you've done
without revealing too much of your next move one of the things that modern
researchers have to do.  Its just part of your research training.
Sometimes people do make the mental leap and get there before you but,
hey, that's life.

However if the students are really worried about this just let them opt
out of putting stuff online.  Forcing people to do anything is a bad idea
IMHO.  In fact it might be interesting to look at how quickly students
without online resources get jobs compared to those with online resources.
Think of it as an experiment. :-)

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *