PLAGIARISM: OLD WINES IN NEW BOTTLES

Sobrido Prieto M* , González Guitián C*, Ribes Cot MF**

Paper presented at the 9th European Conference of Medical and Health LibrariesSantander, September 20th-25th 2.004

We can understand plagiarism as the appropriation of ideas and jobs already published without citing the source. It is also considered not citing the author of an idea or a piece of writing. Neither plagiarism nor reporting it are new. History is full of complaints and anecdotes. 

The structure of the Universe described by Claudio Ptolomeo was currently in force until 1543, in which was substituted by the Copernican system. The 1000 star system of this catalogue was copied from Hiparco of Rhodes works. Those stars  could only be seen at a 5º latitude from the north of Alexandria, just from Rhodes Island.

Johann Bernoulli, a mathematician from the eighteenth century, advanced artificially published data from his own book to therefore claim himself the theorem discovered by his son.

Recently AIDS, discovered by Jean Luc Montagnier in 1983, was attributed to Robert Gallo. In March of 1987 they signed up a co paternity agreement.

At the present time, there are new forms of plagiarism that involves all kind of knowledge or creative areas: artistic, literary or scientific. 

"To look for what others have said and to tell it, you are not going to invent it. We all do it”. With these words the writer and director of the National Library of Spain, Luis Racionero, answered the accusations of plagiarism of a job written by Gilbert Murry, professor of the University of Oxford, 80 years ago.

In the scientific field, and sometimes, the role of reviewers has certainly been seen very unclear. Original documents pending revision arrive at their hands and they use it for their own investigations. Serious abuse of editorial power is rarely published, but evidence that it occurs is accumulating. This is not the only case of plagiarism. Medline Search revealed more than 30 manuscripts that contained passages allegedly taken form prior publication of other researchers.

With Internet the amount of plagiarism due to cutting and pasting of others people documents has increased tremendously. A simple movement of a mouse turns people into authors. 

Therefore we can consider Internet as the biggest copier in the world. There is no doubt about the facility of publication on the web (We have to remember that traditional edition was an expensive process), as well as absence of peer review.

Some authors believe that plagiarism is not only the partial or total transfer of documents. They also think that there is the creation of similar domains to attract clients, the documents transfer from one web page to another or even the appropriation of resources or directories

There are also some movements agree with plagiarism, like the "Critical Art Ensemble" with creators like "John Perry Barlow". They defend it because It contributes to the cultural enrichment and the spread of ideas. In conclusion, they think that the legal laws are against the privatization of culture. 

In the academic setting, during last few years there have appeared doubtful initiatives like “Evil house of cheat” or “School sucks” that favour practices of plagiarism. 

The student accepts the “cut and paste” system as normal, and most of all he does not realize that the document included on The Net, also has an author.

 Conscious of the importance of this offence it has been begun to consider plagiarism as itself, something that until the moment was not gathered. 

Several mechanisms are being developed to identify plagiarism, such as education programs to promote good conducts. We need to ensure that students understand the meaning of plagiarism and, more importantly, its consequences. The breadth of plagiarism, from copying a phrase to duplicating research data, is wide. We cannot presume students know this. After all, when students memorize facts from recommended textbooks and reproduce them verbatim during closed-book examinations, we do not penalize them for plagiarism. Yet, the same act committed on paper could well constitute plagiarism. 
In addition to educating students on ethics, we need to ensure that academic institutions have discrete policies on handling cases of plagiarism and research misconduct; 

In the USA exists the Scientific Integrity Office in charge to identify scientific frauds in their different versions, between like plagiarism. The ORI created a committee to elaborate directed recommendations in order to foment scientific integrity. 

In the legislative aspect during last years, were created some nationals laws to detect this kind of fraud. 

The Spanish effective law is one of most recent of Europe and it recognize the copyright on Internet, as specifies in its article 10. 
"they are protected works all the literary, artistic or scientific creations original expressed by any means or have supported, tangible or intangible, at the moment or that are invented in the future”

In the other hand US was one of the first to create specific offices to detection. Digitalis Millennium Copyright Act was born to modify the Copyright Act referring to the operation and work protection in digital format

Nevertheless, one of great problems is the protection copyright on Internet with the informative globalization, national legislations enter game different.

On February of 2000 European Parliament approved a European directive relative one to the harmonization of compatible rights of author and in the society of the information 

But the most important tools to detect plagiarism were born in the academic World, since the educational ones were undergoing the plagiarism of their students. 

Turnitin       http://www.turnitin.com/
Turnitin.com is a tool with automated and updated web robots that can help you find passages within papers Focus on searching online paper mills that may be plagiarized. Text within a submitted paper is compared to text within other existing documents. If a match is found, it is highlighted. Turnitin doesn’t examine citation correctness. It only “matches” text. Because of this, matched text passages must be examined carefully to find out if a passage has been correctly cited, poorly cited, or plagiarized. 
 
SCAM (Stanford Copy Analysis Mechanism) copy detector in digital libraries
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november95/scam/11shivakumar.html

CHECK information retrieval techniquese Información 
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~shiva/SCAM/scamInfo.html

World-wide Organization of the Intellectual Property approved in 2002 The treatment of author rights to establish a legal base in the protection of the author rights and to turn Internet trustworthy means to create, to distribute and to control the work use in the digital format.

Librarians have an important role in the prevention and detection of plagiarism; as defenders of intellectual protection And also as facilitators of information. In conclusion we have to actively promote academic integrity. Therefore we have to do different information campaigns to their users about:

Consciousness about plagiarism as fraudulence through different training programs and consciousness about importance of Vancouver style as a recognition tool. 
Detection programs through authorship check systems and Elaboration of directories with a minimum guaranteed requirements 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.	“Council directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the Information Society”
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