(source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/3020966500/)
The book or journal authors are
scratching their head to figure out how to deal with online plagiarism!
In the era of internet, every
kind of information is available online. As an undergraduate student, indeed it
is very convenient for me to get plenty of information to assist me in doing
academic research. As I am doing the academic works in order to graduate from
university, we are required to cite every idea that we obtained from the
internet. But how about others people that does not have any obligations with
academic purpose? They might just share the content of journals and books over
the internet without the permission from the authors and worst come to the
worst they might use the information like it is their own work, there is where
plagiarism always happen. Plagiarism can
be defined as the inappropriate, unauthorized, unacknowledged use of someone
else’s ideas as if they were original or common knowledge (Gotterbarn et al.
2006).
Ironically, the scholarly
publishing industry has been greatly affected by the digital era, because ‘the
very content of the publishing business is, at the end of the day, a
digitizable asset (Oppenheim 2008). Plagiarism issue may indirectly give
negative impact on the future academic paper output as sharing the works openly
by third party will greatly reduce the revenue generated to the author. Undeniable,
the authors are more concern on the ability to generate revenue from their
works. If their works are freely being shared all over the internet and causing
the authors to make less in generate revenue, this will affect the future
output of academic papers as the revenue serve as a motivation for them to move
on.
The most common way to protect
their works to being illegally used by the public is to have copyright for
their works. Copyright is not only benefit the authors but also the publisher
as most of the journals and books are published under an agreement with the
publishers. According to Oppenheim (2008), protecting rights is in the
interest of both parties; publishers want to prevent their digital content from
being used, duplicated and distributed without permission or compensation,
whilst authors of scholarly works want to ensure their moral right to be
identified as the creator is upheld.
In my opinion, the internet users should appreciate the hard
work created by the authors. It is not easy to produce a book or even a journal
paper. It takes days and months for them to be completed. Buying original copy
and citing the authors in our work are the ways to appreciate the works by the
authors and also motivate them to produce more quality works in the future.
Reference list
Oppenheim, C 2008, Electronic scholarly publishing and open
access, Journal of Information Science, Vol 34, No 5, p.557-590,
Gotternbarn, D, Miller, K and Impagliazzo J 2006, Plagiarism
and Scholarly Publications: An Ethical Analysis, Session M1H, viewed 15 Nov
2011,
