Reflective Blogging: PLAGIARISM

Hi guys!

Today I'm going to write about a very 'hot' issue: PLAGIARISM! In simple words, in the academic world plagiarism can be defined as the imitation of words, ideas or opinions without identifying their own original source. For this reason, many authors protect their materials with IPR (Intellectual Property Rights). These rights allow their holders to control the use and reproduction of their creative works, which could be books, songs, films, photographs, articles and so on. Some solutions to avoid plagiarism are CREATIVE COMMONS, which is my new discovery too!! It is a non-profit corporation that allows people to mark their works freely in different ways corresponding to the different ways in which people can interact with them. In the following list you can find the different types of licences.

• Attribution is when you can use the materials by crediting the original author.
• Share alike is when the derivative works can be distributed only under an identical license.
• Non commercial is when materials can be used only without commercial purposes.
• No derivative works is when only verbatim copies are allowed.

An example of creative commons can be identified in Flickr, which is a site about pictures.
About ethics and copyright laws, a simple way to avoid plagiarism in our blogs could be:

• attribution;
• paraphrase + reference:
• summary + reference;
• links.

So, simply put some references to the materials we use or cite. It's important to remember the structure of referencing style too!An example could be:

1. author's name and surname,
2. title of book/article + chapter/journal + edited book/title of the blog post,
3. editor's name,
4. pages of chapter or journal article,
5. publisher/ url and date of the last visit.

I think that reflecting on plagiarism is very important not only because it is an offensive and bad habit, but also because in some countries it is punished with the failing of your course or even expulsion from university! Indeed, in the websites of many American universities I found explanations about plagiarism rules and punishments. For example, at Tiburg University in the case of plagiarism within a thesis a new thesis has to be written and at the Saginaw Valley State University I found a lovely honour code written to demonstrate respect to the work of other people and to maintain the honour of the university. Often universities provide tips for avoiding plagiarism and here you can find an example about Northwestern University. I shared this and other information on Delicious too.
Now that you know (more or less) everything about plagiarism remeber to pay attention to it!!

Bye

Elisabetta


PS I realized I could cover my pictures with copyright!However, I don't think I'm going to do it because if a person decides to 'copy' my pictures this means they are nice!;-)