Authorship plus Copyright – the synonyms or antonyms of Plagiarism?

By Clara Martins, Edite Figueiras, Inês Moreira

Let us start with a question. Do you believe that you are reading an authentic post? Now is the time for you to reflect. Maybe you are starting to get suspicious, but even if you want to find out which is the true answer, have you ever searched for the right tools to be able to discover it? Let us see the unseen.

The publication of a scientific article, book chapter or other study involves the work of one or more groups. Sometimes, an impertinent question arises:

Who should be author?

Currently, the pressure to publish and the increase number of publications by author, in order to improve the career or getting a job leads to academic fraud.

Let us see some unethical authorship:

What do we know about Gift, Ghost and Guest authorship? What about Coercive authorship?

Adapted from www.slideshare.net/balaram_biomedcentral/publication-ethics-for-biomedical-researchers-1-brazil-2015

The Gift and Guest authorship includes authors who did not contribute significantly to the research but who received credits for authorship due to their hierarchy. On the other hand, Ghost authors are who contributed to the research but are not listed, generally due to a conflict of interest from editors and reviewers.

The Coercive authorship involves the exertion of pressure from a person in senior position over junior researchers.

Adapted from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/authorship-abuse-is-the-dark-side-of-collaboration

However, to overcome this type of fraud, some journals editors have already presented some solutions such as the presentation of conflict-of-interest declarations, and the confirmation by the corresponding author that all who deserve authorship are listed.Moreover, some journals require each author to have an identified and legitimate role in the research.

And regarding the author list order: Who should be the first author? And the last?

The authorship varies depending on the research area, international cultures and between research groups and laboratories.

Adapted from https://www.lindau-nobel.org/blog-rethinking-authorship/

Usually, the first author is the one who contributes substantially to the work more than the other authors. After the first author, the subsequent authors are listed considering their contribution to the research.

The last author commonly is the senior researcher or the head of the research project.

To acquire more accurate information, we must consult the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (icmje.org/recommendations/), which describes the main criteria to be considered for authorship.

Now that you understand what means authorship, let us talk about other types of fraud that arise when messing with this topic – Plagiarism. By definition, plagiarism is the stealing of intellectual property without acknowledge the original authorship, whether of ideas, text or results. In the past years, higher education organizations across Europe have been looking for a solution to plagiarism. As a society we are guided by principles of ethics and integrity that continue to not be achieved. However, if it is such a massive problem, why are we not applying penalties? There are several studies showing that, particularly in the academic territory, we are being too benevolent. In December 2016, the head of a Spanish university, where students were closely supervised for plagiarism has been accused of plagiarising himself, leading to his dismissal from a national education commission. Clearly it is necessary that not only students learn how to avoid plagiarism and why should avoid it, but also educators, professors and researchers must be informed and convinced of the risks of plagiarism usage.

Adapted from Martínez, S., Wimmer, M. & Cabot, J. Efficient plagiarism detection for software modelling assignments. Comput. Sci. Educ. 30, 187–215 (2020)

The most common penance for an initial accusation of plagiarism in academic environment includes from a zero mark, which is something you can recover from, to various forms of legal sanctions. Plagiarism in scientific studies can result in warning, public apology, dismissal, but principally a great loss to the career of professionals, with deep personal frustration. In Portugal, plagiarism is considered a crime that can have legal punishment with prison sentence until three years and penalty from 150 to 250 days, depending on the severity of the situation.

Adapted from https://penmypaper.com/blog/beat-plagiarism-with-proofreading/

After this you may ask: Am I the owner of my work? ©

According to the law, copyright is granted to authors and no registration is needed to become the legitimate copyright holder of your own work. The problem comes when the author wants to publish. This oftentimes results in a transfer of the copyrights from the author to the publisher. As an author, before signing a publishing agreement, you should take some time to reflect, as some journals will require a complete transfer of copyright from you to the publisher, which means that you no longer can use your own work without permission.

The publishing workflow for an academic journal article includes preprints, postprints and published papers. Typically, subscription publishers require transfer of copyright ownership from the authors to the publisher, and the work published will be accessed via a paywall. On the other side, open access publishers will ask authors a reuse license to the work so that it can be hosted by the publisher and openly shared, reused and adapted and the authors retain the copyright. A great tool, the database SHERPA/RoMEO consolidates the copyright and open access self-archiving policies of academic journals, showing the authors whether the journal allows preprint or postprint archiving in their copyright transfer agreements.

Copyright violation is illegal but it is quite common in academia, being the most mediatic cases the battle between scientific publishers and websites with a guerilla open access policy as Sci-Hub and LibGen. In particular, USA court already granted Elsevier 15 million dollars in damages for copyright infringement.

Students of today will be the leaders of tomorrow. All these topics need to be taken more seriously, and even if frauds continuous to occur with the implementation of new laws, it will not be the end of your profession if you choose to take it as an effective teaching moment and not as something regular.

REFERENCES

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