One Step at a time

Dear colleagues

With the exception of Mr. Marashi of Shiraz who had shown interest but could not make it over for the meeting, and one colleague from carnegie Mellon U, Portugal branch, who said that he might do a web conference, the meeting in the Lab did not take place with our associates. Most probably I had overstepped the bounds of being a good host by offering food from our canteen. For the next meeting I cook. 

However, there had been a tremendous response by our graduate students. I was incessently grilled about the issue. Some interesting ideas were floored, I decided to hold the reins on sending that executive summary to the University of Tehran Administrative Central for two reasons:

1- If University of Tehran rush the matter of anti-plagiarism and academic Misconduct protocol,  there is a distinct possibility of letting the genie out of the bottle too soon. Many universities may attempt to follow suite without having the means of implementing nor enforcing the measures effectively. We might cook the goose prematurely

2- I have been following the posts and comments of many interested parties, especially Dr. Donyagar, Mr. riazi, and Unstructured Observation.  I have decided to modify a technique I learned for product development, called IDEO U for this exercise. While my invitation stands (for Dr. Donyagar the offer is good whenever he visits Iran), I hope that interested parties should consider the following:

A) A Faculty member accuses another faculty member of plagiarism or infringement of intellectual property. If they refer the case to you what would you do?

B) A student complains about a member of faculty not giving credit where credit is due in a research that was under the faculty member direction but executed by the student, or that the student did the primary legwork. The faculty member accuses the  student of theft and misconduct or worst misappropriation of original research ideas. How would you approach the issue.

C) A professor from an established university accuses a member of your faculty of mispropriety of intellectual domain, in another word,  unabashed plagiarism. You send him a missive of  attestation, he/she sends over a sworn statement. Under the local law or even by-laws of your university the act may not be plagiarism, but it could be under the foreign professor's country of origin. How do you foresee the arbitration process?

Please limit your responses to no more than 200 words per scenario and send it to my research assistant, Miss Shahed Rashidi at Shahedrashidi  AT  yahoo.com.

In the course of the next four days Miss Rashidi would also contact some of the members, founders and supporters of this blog. Please make certain that we have the right to discuss some of your points with others. We would follow a strict anonymity procedure but it would be nice if you let us know of any fine details we might miss.  Please also consider the fact that whether in your opinion do we have any white plagiarism like white hacking we use in security audits?

With best regards

Nader Naghshineh

Information Studies Lab

University of Tehran

P.S. A farsi translation will follow shortly