A Copyright Conundrum - #3

As I try to emphasize copyright in many lessons with my students with the consequences and examples of plagiarism in the publishing and world at large, I am often met with blank stares. I hoped that in other academic settings this was of more concern. However, lately I have been disheartened by some experiences that two authors in my family have experienced. My husband recently wrote a teaching unit for a division of a major university. When the unit was received at the program, the interns working on the project eliminated all the footnotes and references summarily. When the unit was sent back to him for proofreading, the head of the program received an immediate call from my husband who informed him that he had a problem with the lack of citations when he had been so careful to cite things correctly. The citations were restored.


My daughter is working for a think tank in our nation’s capital and is helping to edit a forthcoming book. The book is a collection of articles by experts in the international relations concerning the Middle East. Most of the articles were submitted to her agency with only web links as references. It has become her incredibly time-consuming task to track down these references and she will not be happy until things are cited correctly. Well-regarded professors in major universities and international relations experts submitted these articles. Her professors at Illinois Wesleyan were very meticulous about this issue, thank goodness!


What has happened to make these instances common? What has happened to academic integrity and the issues that we teach as librarians?


In one instance, the lack of a style sheet as they have for World Libraries could have made things much better. However, to completely remove carefully cited information or not to include it at all and not think that is unusual is disturbing to me. Do these issues concern you? What has been your experience, are people in your workplaces indifferent about this?