[AISWorld] Plagiarism and "Self-Plagiarism"

[Lars Taxén]

Hi,

Just a small addition to Pekkola's post.

A similar situation is when you have elaborated a theory that can be
applied to various problems in different contexts. A certain
contribution would then consist of a common "module" describing the
theory, and a specific contribution for each context in which the
theory is applied. Each paper is a significant contribution, although
it contains a part that is the same in several contributions.

It would be nice if you could  "reuse" the theory-module by just
copying the text and write only the specific part. However, this is
not possible today unless you have the consent of the publisher of a
previous contribution. To me, it does not make much sense to make
cosmetic changes in the theory-module just to escape the copy-right
rules.  A "modular" kind of publishing system would be much
appreciated, I believe.

Lars


2011/12/14 Pekkola Samuli <samuli.pekkola at tut.fi>:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> just a little comment.
>
>
>
> The evaluation of an article, whether it is (self-)plagiarism (agree the
> problems with the term), should be based on the contributions of the paper.
> As long as the contributions in two papers are _significantly_ different,
> there should be no issue of recycling chapters/paragraphs or fear being
> accused for plagiarism. This means that conf/workshop papers can be updated
> to journals providing they make significant additions to our knowledge base.
>
>
>
> Particularly this is an issue when constructing the systems/models/etc. For
> example, long time ago I designed, build and evaluated systems. Publishing
> the results of each of those phases meant that I had to recycle the ideas
> and even text from the earlier papers. Let say the first paper(s) was about
> design principles and features of the to-be system. The second (set of)
> papers were more technical. To understand them and the design rationale
> behind, I had to describe the design principles from the first (set of)
> papers. And with the third set of papers, i.e. evaluating the technical
> construct, I had to describe both the design principles (i.e. the criteria
> for evaluation) and technical construct (that provided a basis to argue why
> certain criteria were confirmed/disconfirmed). In other words, a large
> portion of content of the third set of papers were adapted from the earlier
> two sets. However, each and every paper still makes different contribution.
>
>
>
> From this perspective, to make strict rules that x% of the text needs to be
> new is bit strange, as a lot of content might be the same (even though
> rewritten). My two cents is to focus on contributions and their uniqueness
> and significance.
>
>
>
> samuli
>
>
>
> --
>
> Samuli Pekkola
>
> Professor, Adjunct Professor, PhD
> Head of Department
>
> Department of Business Information Management and Logistics
> Tampere University of Technology
> PO Box 541, 33101 Tampere, Finland
> t: +358 (0)40 586 0791
> e: samuli.pekkola at tut.fi
>
>
>
>


-- 
Lars Taxén, Associate Professor
Department of Science and Technology
Campus Norrköping, Linköpings Universitet
Rundan 91
SE 14645 Tullinge, Sweden
mobile: +46 (0)73 0977864
lars.taxen at telia.com
www.neana.se