I'm writing this to exorcise my butthurt about the bot's diagnosis of cheating in one of my previous posts. Yeah, I know is a bot and it does things automatically. I know it's programmed to be right almost all the time. This is not a defense of myself, as I used material from Wikipedia, even if I referenced it.
I know and yet I can't help but respond emotionally as I wonder what good can I bring by trying to share concepts with people, explaining them and trying to connect ideas if is not 100% completely original. That's my problem.
Now I want to show how plagiarism works and why high sensitivity to plagiarism is actually a good thing, even if is me who gets diagnosed as the infractor.
First, this is a review.
Trying to condensate what I think is most relevant to the subject. Of course, I will link to better sources than me. A really good resource is http://www.plagiarism.org/
This study by Turnitin in 2012, identified 10 types of plagiarism and how 900 high school instructors perceive them in terms of frequency and impact. 1
Intentional and not intentional(like cryptomnesia). Proving intention is too much trouble.
Once an idea is published in any hard medium is covered by international copyright laws. If not followed properly could have consequences even if the plagiarism is by one on one's own work. Each medium and place can have their own set of laws that differ among countries, organizations, and medium, Something that often puzzles international students.2
Image modified from source
Image modified from source
Open access journals are plagued with an epidemic of plagiarism. "Predatory journals" as they are known, 42% of them are based in India.3 Nearly 11.000 fake open access journals have been identified by 2016.4
The publishing model has relied for a long time on unpaid editors and contributors and by charging libraries for access to this information. Now with the apparition of tools like Sci-Hub which has in store 69% of all scientific publications. Access to 97 to 85% of Elsevier's catalog for free, this model is about to go awry.5
Open source. Is highly problematic.
Lowering the barrier to entry to publishing has its pros and cons. It requires communities of individual authors with cutting edge ethics and knowledge.
One plus side is for instance, how this 2014 paper is a blog entry [7]. Later authors of a quite similar F1000Research paper published in 2016 that attracted a lot of attention, discussed even in the economist had to be retracted, as is shown here in retraction watch 8.
Social sites like this and onG.social. New projects in the journals area like moringa.pub or ALETHEIA, completely free journal, have great potential due to peer review anonymous yet verifiable reputation systems. One can't only rely on ease of access or good will.
As these technologies are not Turing test resistant, other reliable humans are currently the only check for the value it seems.
Some interesting places to keep check of developments are:
http://www.opensciencefair.eu/
http://www.blockchainforscience.com
Tools for self-checking to avoid plagiarism.
- Grammarly
The one I use, not infallible it seems: A paid tool that checks for spelling and grammar mistakes. Has integrated its own tools of plagiarism check. - Plagscan
- CopyScape
- Turnitin
- http://turnitin.com/assets/en_us/media/plagiarism_spectrum.php
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3038591/
- https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2
- List of predatory journals http://beallslist.weebly.com/
- http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/sci-hub-s-cache-pirated-papers-so-big-subscription-journals-are-doomed-data-analyst
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Blockchain+technology+for+improving+clinical+research+quality.
- https://www.bgcarlisle.com/blog/2014/08/25/proof-of-prespecified-endpoints-in-medical-research-with-the-bitcoin-blockchain/
- http://retractionwatch.com/2017/05/24/authors-retract-much-debated-blockchain-paper-f1000/