December 21, 2005
Forum Launched
for Posting Comments, Reviews of Content for Disabled Students
The Center for Accessible
Publishing has created an online forum for the posting of comments and
reviews of files provided by textbook publishers for use by students
with disabilities. An estimated 20,000 files will be provided this year
to US colleges by textbook publishers, at no additional cost to the
student or the college. College students with disabilities that impair
their ability to read print have been adopting electronic books as a
method to perform their classroom reading. Electronic books can be converted
to audio, enlarged on a computer screen, or converted to Braille. To
meet the rising demand for electronic books, colleges have turned to
publishers for help. While publishers have been providing free electronic
files for over five years, quality and timeliness is still causing difficulties
for colleges. The new online forum was established to give colleges
a public place to voice their comments and suggestions to publishers.
The forum can be accessed at www.accessiblepublishing.org/forum
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Marketing Research
Text Includes WebSurveyor
WebSurveyor Corporation,
the leading provider of online survey solutions, announced today that
it is included in the fifth edition of "Marketing Research" by Alvin
Burns and Ronald Bush — the global leader in undergraduate marketing
research. This is the first published Pearson Prentice Hall textbook
that features the WebSurveyor Academic Grant Program which gives qualified
colleges and universities free access to the company's powerful online
research software.
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Check Out a New
Book Industry Study on Used Books
Study found at this
web site: http://www.bisg.org
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2006
TAA Convention to be Held at Disney's Grosvenor Resort
The 2006 TAA Convention
will be held at the Grosvenor Resort in the Walt Disney World Resort
in Orlando, Florida, July 7-8. Hotel rates for convention attendees
are $99 per night (which includes a $9 resort fee; parking included).
This elegant hotel is on the trolley line and is within the Disney Resort.
Convention registration is $75 for members before May 1, $125 after;
registration for non-members is $125 before May 1, $175 after. Non-member
registration includes a one-year membership to TAA. The Awards Banquet
dinner, held Friday, July 7, is optional, and is an additional $45 per
person. To make a reservation at the Grosvenor Resort, call 1-800-624-4109.
Learn more about the Grosvenor Resort at http://www.grosvenorresort.com
To register for the convention contact Janet Tucker, TAA's Managing
Director, at (727) 563-0020.
*Coming Soon: Secure
Online Form for Registering for TAA Conventions*
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Plagiarism of
self and others explored:
"Don't shade your
eyes, plagiarize"
by Richard T. Hull
Tom Lehrer has
a wonderful song about a (fictionalized) mathematician named Nicolai
Ivanovich Lobachevsky who made his career by publishing other's work
as his own. Lehrer includes in the song Lobachevsky's advice to a young
student, "Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember
why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize,
plagiarize, plagiarize - only be sure please always to call it research."
(http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#lobachevsky)
TAA Executive
Director Richard T. Hull explores the muddy waters of plagiarism.
|
Lehrer's song was
a spoof of the almost ubiquitous claim of Soviet scientists to have
discovered everything first. But behind it is a deeper and darker, much
more complex set of cultural phenomena, our own, and others'.
Recently, Australians
have started an online journal that deals with "matters of academic
rectitude, including soft marking, fraud, and other forms of academic
dishonesty, as well as plagiarism." (I had to look up "soft marking":
it is giving inflated grades to full-tuition-paying students.) Published
twice a year, the International Journal for Educational Integrity "seeks
to examine the theme of plagiarism in Australia, particularly in relation
to the country's historically high number of international students
among whom English is not a first language." (David Cohen, "Australian
Scholars, Beset With Plagiarism, Inaugurate new Journal on Academic
Integrity" (http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005121608n.htm).
When I was first
a graduate student teaching my first sections of Introduction to Philosophy,
my Chair advised me to carefully scrutinize student papers to be sure
no one got away with presenting someone else's work as his or her own.
I remember the combination of exasperation and triumph upon finding
one student's term paper that began, "In the last chapter we have shown
. . . ."
The purchase and
misrepresentation of other's term papers, and even dissertations, has
become so common that a small business has sprung up offering software
and databases that use crawlers to search for other papers on the web,
offering highlighted comparisons of passages found to be similar or
identical. An online article by Robert Harris discusses the issue of
student plagiarism, and provides links to commercial services that offer
plagiarism detection: http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm.
In my later years
of teaching Graduate Research Ethics, we included a unit on plagiarized
work for incoming first year graduate students, many of whom were foreign
trained. It seems that in some other cultures, one shows mastery of
one's professors' work, or any other work, by being able to reiterate
it word for word on examinations and papers. Rooting out this cultural
expression of respect proved surprisingly difficult.
But the most interesting
cases of plagiarizing were ones that came to me as a member of a faculty
ethics committee, where well-established faculty were shown to have
plagiarized their own work! Often such accusations and disclosures were
met by the aggrieving faculty member with astonishment, as though the
very notion of stealing one's own work were inconceivable. "How could
I steal what is mine?!" was the common initial response.
Of course, the
issue is not so much stealing one's own work as misrepresenting it as
newly-confirmed research results. A journal has a strong interest in
its publications being new and fresh, not reprints of work first appearing
elsewhere. As we began to point this out to offending faculty, sometimes
a realization would break across their faces as though a novel idea
had just been presented.
Sometimes a scholar
is invited to expand on remarks previously made in print. It is mightily
difficult (and I am guilty of this) not to succumb to the temptation
to quote part of your own work as a frame for whatever expansive remarks
occur after the fact, or to reuse a particularly apt example. Other
times, it seems, a request to a recognized scholar for a piece in an
inaugural issue of a new journal is most easily accommodated with a
simple reprint, perhaps with a new title and even with an enhanced set
of authors (perhaps one's graduate students), of a previous work. These
practices shade into increasingly false representations of truths the
trust in which academic scholarship depends. They also take up scarce
journal space that otherwise would be available for other, original
work.
Mindful of the
tendency to unwittingly quote from one's own or others' work (perhaps
supported by sloppy note taking), a new software program has been devised
by computer science faculty to assist scholars in avoiding inadvertent
plagiarism. Titled "SPlaT," the software tool promises to help avoid
"cryptomnesia" (oddly defined as "reusing one's own previously published
text while unaware of its existence"), and can be also used to guard
against inadvertent plagiarism from papers in some specified repository
of works, as well as to check a paper under review against the author's
previously published work. Details and a downloadable copy may be found
at http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/
Another area of
potential plagiarism involves review of unpublished manuscripts and
unfunded grant applications. Reviewers are supposed not to take advantage
of their positions as first readers of the intellectual children of
others, but suspicions abound that that privileged position is too often
abused. A recent call from an individual not a member of TAA about his
suspicions regarding a protracted period of review (8 months!) of a
book manuscript by a young scholar who was also involved in publishing
on the same topic prompted several suggestions about communication between
the inquirer's editor and the reviewer's editor that might either put
the suspicions to rest or confirm them. At least in the case of institutional
review boards, a legally enforceable obligation not to disclose or otherwise
profit from reading research proposals holds for all members of such
boards. Easily said, but not easily avoided.
Writing as we do
in a common language, the distinction between plagiarism and use of
cultural verbal icons is surprisingly difficult to define. Moreover,
as language is the vehicle of ideas, it is a rare active researcher
who has not profited from insights communicated at a poster session,
colloquium talk, in a manuscript or grant review, or in casual conversation.
Even the most well-known scholars have fallen victim to their own memories,
with apt phrases coming to mind in the creative process, often under
the pressure of deadlines, the origins of which aren't immediately evident.
So plagiarism of
self and others is a human failing against which we must guard ourselves
and must caution our students. Integrity in an age of increased accessibility
to the digitized printed word is hard to achieve, even for us who didn't
learn out ethics from Tom Lehrer.
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TAA newsletter
archive now online
A PDF archive of
TAA member newsletters, TAA Report and The Academic Author,
dating back to the summer of 1987, is now online in the TAA Members-Only
Member Center. The archive lists a table of contents for each issue.
Click
here to view the archive in the Members Only section
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Still Missing
Some TAA Newsletter Issues
TAA is still looking
for some missing issues of The Academic Author to make its online archive
complete. Please look through your stack of issues for 1995 # 5; 1995
# 8 and above, if any; 1996 # 8 and above, if any: 1997 # 3 and above,
if any; and 2004 #1. Please send them to TAA Executive Director Richard
T. Hull at 3241 Heather Hill Lane Tallahassee, FL 32309. He will return
them once they're scanned.
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New Form Allows
Online Donations to TAA Foundation
TAA has made it
easier than ever to make a donation to the TAA Foundation by creating
a secure online donation form. The form is accessible through the TAA
Foundation page, the TAA Notes page and the online new member/renewal
form. To make an online donation to the TAA Foundation, click
here. Your donation to the TAA Foundation will be matched $1 for
$1 by a $15,000 matching grant from TAA.
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Renew Your Membership
Online!
TAA has just launched
a new online member form that will allow members to renew online using
a secure server. The form can also be used by new members. Check it
out in the TAA Member Center here.
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