Wrap Up: Plagiary Begins Publishing Articles

Overall, it’s been another slow week for plagiarism news. No major scandals have surfaced, no new laws have been enacted and, to my knowledge, little has happened. Though a few bloggers have been dealing with the growing scourge of automated plagiarism, little new has been taking place.

However, there has been one story well worth mentioning, something many of us with an interesting in plagiarism have been very excited about for a long time.

Plagiarism Begins Publication

Plagiary, the academic journal that contains “Cross-disciplnary studies in plagiarism, fabrication and falsification,” published its first articles last week.

The first paper, entitled “Cases of Plagiarism Handled by the United States Office of Research Integrity 1992-2005” (link PDF) by Alan Price, a review of the cases reported to the ORI during that time period and includes “A historical review of the 19 ORI plagiarism cases, describing the characteristics of those respondents, the PHS administrative actions taken against them, the source of the plagiarized material, and the type of person who detected the plagiarism.”

Also included in this round of publication is a review by Diane Boehm on two books, “Doing Honest Work in College” and “Understanding Plagiarism”, as well as an abstract of a future paper by Jonathan Band entitled “The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story”.

On a personal note, I am very excited about some of the upcoming papers including “Textual Re-Use in Journalistic Domains”, “Plagiarism, Power and Tactics”, “Automatic Plagiarism Detection”, “The Cut and Paste Plagiarist Culture”, “Plagiarism and the Problems of the Deaf and Deaf ESL Learners” and “Plagiarism and Identity Theft”

So, even though the first few papers haven’t dealt with my particular area of expertise, I’m even more excited about this journal now than when I first spoke with Professor Lesko several months ago.

I truly is turning into a beautiful thing and I’m looking forward to writing a paper for submission.

Snake Bite: Plagiarism in Children’s Literature

In other news, The Book Standard is reporting that the publisher Blue Apple will not be releasing a children’s book by Harriet Ziefert after discovering that 11 out of 23 lines from the book were identical to another book that was released in 1983. The book entitled The Snake is Totally Tail was slated to be released this April, however, after its similarities to a book of the same name by famous children’s author Judi Barrett were discovered, the publisher backed down.

Ziefert said that she was “shocked” after being made aware of the similarities but was relieved that the book had not yet reached print. Ziefert went on to say that it was “very important to me that in both my writing and in my publishing, I maintain the highest ethical standard.”

There is no word yet if Ziefert plans on rewriting and releasing the book or if she will be publishing any additional books with Blue Apple in the future.

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright Law, Copyright, Copyright Infringement[/tags]