Week 2 -- Produsage & Plagiarism

Produsage -- the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement (Bruns, 2008, p. 21).

Lots of related concepts intertwined here -- community, collaboration, content -- along with
"Generation C" themes of "creativity, causal collapse, control and celebrity" (Bruns, 2008, p. 5).

With a paradigm shift from individual to communal, commercial to free, product to process, and push to pull, important questions arise about intellectual property and plagiarism. With ubiquitously accessible information and a publish then filter mentality, is it possible that Generation C has abandoned as outdated notions of academic integrity and plagiarism?

This week, I encountered the most egregious case of academic dishonesty of my nearly 30 history in academia. A graduate student submitted a paper that was 96% (SafeAssign score) matched to published material without any attribution. The student had lifted excerpts and abstracts (without accessing the full source) verbatim and dropped these "cut and paste" sections into her submission. Save a few lines that were minimally paraphrased (substituting a single word in a long passage), the paper was 100% the published work of other authors. Her reference list included references cited by the original source. In other words, lifting from Dennen, if Dennen said, "Davis (2008) reports ...." then the student cited Davis, not Dennen.

The student did not believe that she had violated the Code of Academic Integrity. Perhaps, she believes the arrangement of the five sources was her granular creative contribution and therefore she shared ownership of the final product.

I think this begs the question of substantive contribution. Moore Moore v. Regents of the University of California is a landmark case that deals with body part property rights. In a nutshell, Dr. David Godle had developed a commercial cell line for cancer research utilizing tissue samples from Mr. John Moore. Mr. Moore claimed a right to share in the profits from the cell line since his (discarded) body parts were instrumental in developing the line. This is but one example from many in clinical research where pharma develops a product with a mega-billion dollar profit from samples provided by volunteer participants.

What is value each contribution -- tissue versus intellectual property of developing a cell line?

Is there a qualitative difference between writing content and arranging content? Does equipotentiality, granularity and shared (not owned) content necessarily result in a causal collapse of recognition and protection of intellectual property and an erosion of academic integrity?