Page 33 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

• What exactly does the joint or collective responsibility of all authors imply?

• Obviously, every co-author cannot be held responsible for everything in a multi-authored paper.
The report noted that, “Collaborative scientific research requires a high level of trust among
participants. However, such trust must be balanced with a responsibility to ensure the veracity of all
results. Shared credit for the accomplishment must be matched with shared responsibility.”

The Remedial Measures

• Co-authors have, or can demand, access to technical details, and referees do not have that kind
of access some Therefore, publishers now insist on an explicit statement that all co-authors have
read the manuscript and agree with its content.
• Co-authors shoulder a major responsibility to ensure against fabrication or falsification and,
they can be sure that some penalty for any such fraud will be imposed on them as well.
• While we must trust our collaborators, that trust should not be blind or absolute. Collaborators
must ensure against fabrication and falsification.
• Penalties must definitely be imposed on the main author responsible for collecting data who
obviously passed off fabricated or falsified data as genuine.
• In the future it is highly likely that penalties will also be imposed on the co-authors since they
are the first to see the suspect data, and to analyse it. They also have the moral authority to seek
its verification by asking for the raw and unprocessed data.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism occurs during the writing up of the research report when credit is not given where it is due
to the earlier research publications, and violates ethics during the publication process. In fabrication
or falsification there is a clearly identifiable set of perpetrators who author the research; the victims are
not easily identified because they are those who believe the research and spend time trying to proceed
further. Or those who are not happy with the conclusions and inferences of the published research
and want to verify it by reproducing it. These are victims who have wasted a lot of time that they
could have spent more productively, and their identity will be known only if they decide to protest
publicly (at the risk of wasting even more time!). In plagiarism there are clearly identifiable victims in
the persons whose work was plagiarized. Their credit has been stolen. Perpetrators who plagiarize are
violators, and those who are plagiarized are victims who lose credit.

Plagiarism is defined as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words
without giving appropriate credit”. Plagiarism does not give credit where it is due, and is an attempt to
steal credit by unethical conduct during the dissemination and publication process. What exemplary
deterrent actions can be taken against the violators, and what actions should be taken in support of the
victims, will be discussed in this chapter. I mention here that there are many cases where the violators
who have perpetrated plagiarism have been given penalties that will act as exemplary deterrents, the
victims of plagiarism have been almost always left with a sense of having achieved only partial closure
in that some regret is expressed but credit to their earlier work has not been ensured. We shall come
back later to whether and how this correction of assigning due credit to the earlier work, or complete
closure for the victims, can be ensured.

India is taking strict measures to ensure that researchers are ethical in that their research publications
are free from plagiarism. Towards this end, UGC issued a Gazette Notification on promotion of,

22 | University Grants Commission