UPDATE!
Prof. Sebastian Morris has commented and his comment is reproduced in full below.
He refers to this follow-up article – http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/article/3/2012032220120322015940691adc5b90a/Accused-IIMA-profs-deny-allegations.html where he is quoted as saying:
“Plagiarism is an academic matter best judged by academic peers. Plagiarism can be of ideas and expression and not of facts except when they are facts that emerge out of particular research. Publicly available facts, and government policy statements when the source is revealed cannot be construed as plagiarism.”
But I would take issue with this statement on two counts:
- it may be comfortable to be “judged” solely by academic peers but that does not work. The Wikiplag site in Germany emphasises the need to get out of the “cozy” establishment environment. So far Wikiplag has found some 20 cases of plagiarised theses which have been missed by the usual “academic peers”
- Merely revealing a source is insufficient – it needs to be properly cited even if the source is as mundane as a government policy document.
Even if documents are in the public domain, improper attribution or citation is plagiarism. And if such documents are copyright protected then reproduction could be copyright violation as well.
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A case of when the dam breaks perhaps. There seems to be an epidemic of plagiarism at IIM-A.
A reader pointed me to this story in the Ahmedabad Mirror:
A fortnight after Gujarat High Court asked IIMA to conduct a fresh inquiry into the case of a professor accused of plagiarism, a fresh controversy is brewing at the premier institute.
This time, an executive with a multinational company who also teaches management at a couple of B schools, has accused five senior IIMA professors of “mass copy-pasting” material from sources without crediting them in their cases.
Professor Anil Sharma has shot off a mail to institute’s director Samir Barua citing “serious instances of plagiarism” by professors Rekha Jain, G Raghuram, Rachna Gangwar, Sebastian Morris and Ajay Pandey. ….
…. The IIMs follow guidelines prepared by Harvard Business School and the American Psychological Association, which say that whenever there is sourcing, verbatim or otherwise, the source has to be cited adequately. Interestingly, the institute has a specialised internet-based software to cross-check research work submitted by students and alerts faculty to plagiarised portions, if any.
Even IIM Indore Director N Ravichandran, a former IIMA professor, has been asked by the Centre to respond to an accusation of plagiarism against him. Prof Ravichandran and a senior faculty member of the institute, Omkar D Palsule-Desai, had submitted a paper on euthanasia that was put up on the IIM website with a “Do not copy or reproduce” warning. Ahmedabad-based researcher K R Narendrababu has complained that the paper was sourced heavily from a Supreme Court judgment without adequate attribution.
A committee of inquiry seems to have been constituted for the earlier case of plagiarism but it is not clear if these cases will also be included.
The k2p blog 