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星期五, 六月 23, 2006
方舟子“学生剽窃，导师有责”一文大半为剽窃
方舟子刊登于2006年6月17日《北京科技报》的文章“学生剽窃，导师有责”中关于托马斯·马特卡的相关内容，为剽窃自《高校内幕》记者Doug Lederman文章“俄亥俄大学的剽窃被揭露”。揭露者为虹桥科技论坛的me2，揭露原文见：link。以下是方舟子和Doug Lederman的文章，以便对照。Doug Lederman另外还有一篇文章，标题就叫做“学生剽窃，导师有责” （Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility）。
学生剽窃，导师有责
·方舟子·2003年，托马斯·马特卡（Thomas A. Matrka）在当了十年工程师后，决定回到大学深造，成了美国俄亥俄大学工程院一名硕士研究生。他的课程学得不错，但是到了2004年夏天，他在写毕业论文时却遇到了麻烦。他的导师多次对他的论文进展表示不满。于是他到学校的图书馆翻阅该导师以前指导的研究生学位论文，想看看有没有可供借鉴之处。
这一看让他大吃一惊。他注意到不少学位论文的许多段落都非常相似，例如，有四篇分别写于1997年和1998年的论文的第三章实际上一模一样，还有一篇从以前的论文照抄了50多页。他用4个月的时间，平均每周花费10个小时来比对这些论文，发现有44篇论文有剽窃的嫌疑。
他认为在学位论文中存在如此大量的剽窃现象，导师不可能不会发现。他向工程院院长做了反映。院长说他会进行调查，但是实际上并没有采取什么行动。于是马特卡又向更高一级的学校领导反映，包括负责校纪的官员和副教务长，但是他们对此都不感兴趣，甚至劝马特卡不要多事。
马特卡换了导师，通过答辩，在2005年6月顺利毕业，获得硕士学位，离开了俄亥俄大学到一家化工厂工作。但是他继续进行“打假”，向俄亥俄大学理事会和高校认证机构寄去揭发材料，呼吁他们进行调查。他同时也向媒体反映，借助舆论向校方施加压力。一个在2004年才创办、但是已经在美国高校中很受欢迎的网站“高校内幕”在去年11月份最早报道了这个事件。马特卡向该网站记者出示了剽窃的证据，指出如果学校不对弄虚作假的论文做出处理的话，将会使所有的学位都跟着贬值：“我只是希望他们能够调查此事，把那些剽窃论文从公共记录中撤掉，因为保留它们会玷污所有的人。”
俄亥俄大学工程院院长则对“高校内幕”的记者否认在他们的研究生中普遍存在剽窃行为，也否认校方没有认真对待马特卡的反映。他说他已调查了马特卡反映的四、五起事例，但是法律禁止他透露其细节。院长并批评了马特卡的说法，说他只会提出指控，却没有给出确凿的证据。他说马特卡之所以会对论文中的相似之处大惊小怪，是因为他不熟悉工程学论文的写法，不知道在论文中有相似的段落和插图是正常的，不能算剽窃。
该院长说学校对剽窃现象是非常重视的，已采取了一些措施来加强对剽窃行为的监督，包括采用专门的软件对论文进行比较，并对学生进行学术道德教育，但是学校并不计划让教师花费时间对图书馆收藏的学位论文进行全面审核。
不过，到今年2月份，俄亥俄大学工程院就改变了态度，宣布已组成一个三人委员会调查马特卡发现的44篇涉嫌剽窃的论文。在调查过程中又发现还有别的论文涉嫌剽窃，总共达55篇。到3月底，该委员会公布了其调查结果，认定其中大多数都构成不同程度的剽窃，建议将所有剽窃论文从图书馆中撤掉，让剽窃者修改其论文，否则就要吊销其文凭。马特卡批评这对剽窃者太宽宏大量了，而且也没有追究导师的责任。
随后，学校教务长任命助理校长和教员代表会前主席组成一个独立的委员会审查这个调查结果。在5月底，审查委员会建议对剽窃者做更严厉的处罚，要求他们再次答辩并修至少一个学分的课。但是审查委员会并不认为责任应该完全由学生来承担，却放过了导师。这些剽窃论文绝大多数都是在三名导师指导下完成的，其中一位还是机械工程系主任。审查委员会建议学校开除这位系主任以及一位有多达11名研究生剽窃的教授，并建议对一位有5名研究生剽窃的教授给予停止指导研究生两年的处罚。教务长说将对该事件做更深入的调查，并将咨询研究学术不端行为的校外专家。
这个事件有一些值得中国读者特别注意的地方。美国学术界有比较规范的处理学术造假的渠道，即便如此，仍然离不开像马特卡这样的业余“打假斗士”的参与，没有他的专注和执着，整个事件就不会暴露出来。即使在事情暴露之后，校方也未必愿意认真对待，因此舆论监督也很有必要。奇怪的是，中国目前连处理学术造假的规范渠道都还没有建立起来，却已经有很多人反对所谓“私人打假”和“媒体炒作”了。
对于涉及学生造假的事件，美国校方一般是严厉地处罚造假学生，不给改正的机会，但如果没有证据表明导师也参与造假，一般并不追究其责任。在这个事件中却倒了过来，肇事者给与了改正的机会，而导师却很可能被不留情地开除。对于大面积的学生造假，导师很难说会完全不知情，很可能正是导师纵容乃至鼓励的结果，正如审查委员会的报道所指出的，这些导师“或者未能监督其学生的写作，或者完全忽视了学术诚信而基本上是在支持学术造假。我们认为这才是最严重的。”中国当前出现的大面积的学生造假情形与此类似，也应该首先追究教师疏于管教、纵容、鼓励、包庇的责任。
2006.6.17.
（北京科技报2006.6.22.）
http://www.xys.org/xys/netters/Fang-Zhouzi/bkb/plagiarism.txt
Perceived Plagiarism at Ohio U.
Thomas A. Matrka has his master’s degree in engineering from Ohio University and a good job in the private sector as a mechanical engineer. So why is he still spending so much time and energy trying to prove that as many as 30 master’s theses in the university’s engineering college contain unoriginal work?“They’re compromising the value of the degree of honest students by not distinguishing between the plagiarism and the honest works,” says Matrka. He has spent lunch hours poring over hundreds of pages of theses in the university’s library and writing university officials and accreditors on a one-man quest to spur an investigation by those better qualified than he is to judge plagiarism. “I’m no expert – I’m one guy over there poking around the library. I just want them to look into it and remove these from the public record, because you’ve tainted all of us by leaving them there.”
The dean of Ohio’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology, Dennis Irwin, rejects Matrka’s view that a widespread plagiarism problem exists in the engineering program, and says the former student is wrong to believe that Ohio officials haven’t taken his charges seriously. The college, he says, has investigated the “four or five” cases that Matrka has brought to his attention, and while Irwin asserts that a federal student privacy law prevents him from discussing details of the review, he acknowledges that “a thesis or theses have been removed” from the library.
Irwin says college officials have also altered their policies in ways that will improve their ability to monitor potential plagiarism in student work in the future, including by requiring electronic submission and using software to check new theses against those previously submitted electronically. But the university has no plans, the dean says, to invest the faculty time necessary for what he calls a “witch hunt” to review the hundreds of past engineering theses and dissertations in the library.
“I’m not sure what action I could take beyond the action I’ve taken up to this point,” Irwin says.
Looking for Guidance
Thomas Matrka did not set out to become a whistle blower.
In 2003, 10 years into his engineering career, he enrolled at Ohio to get a master’s degree. He got good grades, but as he worked on his thesis, he says, his adviser, M.K. Alam, the Moss Professor of Mechanical Engineering, repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with his work. (Alam did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Hoping for insight into projects that had previously won Alam’s approval, Matrka spent some time in the university’s library in the summer of 2004 thumbing through past theses.
He was struck by what he found. As he looked the papers over, Matrka says, he noted similarities — occasionally blatant, extended ones — between many of them. He discovered four theses, for example, in which the third chapters on “fluent and multiphase models” were virtually word for word. Two were from 1997 and two from 1998. Three others, from as many as six years apart, contained paragraphs and drawings that were almost identical. (Matrka provided pages from some of these theses to Inside Higher Ed for review.)
“Some of them were so blatantly obvious, where there was page after page copied from one another or from a textbook,” says Matrka. Some of the overlap is so obvious, he says, that it would be impossible for the professors who oversaw the theses not to have known about it. “It’s a faculty approval problem,” Matrka says. “It’s hard not to conclude that advisers condoned this.”
Those are serious charges, and Matrka first brought them to the attention of Irwin, who Matrka says told him that he would investigate but did not take him up on his offer to share more information (for his part, Irwin says that Matrka gave him four to five theses but has not offered to provide other examples).
Perceiving a lack of momentum, Matrka says he “went up the chain,” taking his charges to the university ombuds office, an associate provost, and a number of other officials at Ohio and elsewhere. At every stage, he says, officials either have expressed little interest in what he has found, discouraged him, or said it was outside their scope of responsibility.
Matrka switched advisers and prepared a project thesis (“Design of an Experiment to Measure Plane Strain Flow Stress at Elevated Temperatures”) that passed muster; he earned his degree in June 2005. Though he has left the university, his campaign has continued.
In recent weeks, he has sent packets of materials containing examples of the alleged plagiarism to Ohio University’s Board of Regents, the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology, a national accreditor, and the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits Ohio University as a whole. Last month he laid out his allegations before the university’s Graduate Student Senate. (The president of the senate, Mark M. Mecum, said in a statement Monday that it was investigating Matrka’s charges.)
His basic theme is that the university undermines the value of all of its degrees if it does not revoke its approval of work that has been done fraudulently. As he wrote this month to the North Central accrediting body: “The college faculty has disregarded its policies and procedures by approving graduate student’s theses and dissertations that contain plagiarism…. The credibility of Ohio University’s students, graduates, and accrediting commission is compromised by Ohio University’s record of defending and maintaining graduate degrees of students who violate basic academic policies.”
‘We Take These Charges Very Seriously’
Irwin, the engineering dean and the Moss Professor of Engineering Education, bristles at the suggestion that faculty members and the college have looked the other way either in approving fraudulent academic work or declining to aggressively investigate Matrka’s charges.
“We take these charges very seriously, as even a single instance can undermine the reputation of a department, a college, a university, and hence the value of the degree,” Irwin says. “My personal opinion is that the problem that is ongoing is due to the fact that Mr. Matrka cannot be told what has happened.”
Initially, Irwin cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which prohibits the release of personally identifiable information from students’ educational records, to explain why he cannot reveal what actions the college has taken in response to the “four to five cases” of alleged plagiarism that a college committee investigated in the wake of Matrka’s charges.
When pressed to explain how revealing the college’s actions, without names attached, could violate the federal law, Irwin said that at least one thesis had “been removed” from the library, but that no students had had their degrees revoked, nor any professors punished in any way. (To the dean’s statement that at least one thesis had been removed from the library, Matrka says that all of the works that he identified as containing possible plagiarism remain in the university library’s catalog, and by virtue of its appearance there, “anybody can go to the library annex and pull the archived version.
Irwin says the college has begun “briefing graduate students on the nature of plagiarism, its consequences, and how to avoid plagiarizing others’ work,” and that it now requires electronic submission of theses and dissertations and a statement of originality signed by all students. Beginning this winter, he says, the college will “begin using comparison software to screen all of the theses submitted against all of those we have in electronic form.”
What the college will not do, he says, is ask his faculty to review what could be “tens of thousands of pages” of hard-copy theses and dissertations” in the library. That could take a huge amount of faculty time for an uncertain payoff, he says, “so you can probably see our problem in meeting any demand that all instances of plagiarism be removed from the library.”
Irwin adds: “I know Mr. Matrka is not satisfied with our actions to date, but all I’ve heard are accusations, and I haven’t been presented with any evidence that those accusations are true.”
Part of the problem, the dean says, may be a “different in interpretation between what [Matrka] considers to be plagiarism” and the university’s own interpretation. With technical works like engineering theses, he says, “there are going to be similarities, particularly in equations and diagrams.” He adds: “If the same two people worked on the same experiment or apparatus, it is conceivable that they would jointly develop schematic drawing of that that might be used in both of their theses.”
Matrka admits that that possibility could explain some of the cases that looked fishy to him – which is why he has encouraged the university to turn the review over to faculty members more knowledgeable than he is.
But many of the other examples he has identified, he says, don’t require an expert’s eye. “Some of this stuff you wouldn’t get away with in high school.”
— Doug Lederman
http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/11/01/plagiarism
相关法规：
中华人民共和国著作权法
第三条 本法所称的作品，包括以下列形式创作的文学、艺术和自然科学、社会科学、工程技术等作品：
（一）文字作品；
（二）口述作品；
（三）音乐、戏剧、曲艺、舞蹈、杂技艺术作品；
（四）美术、建筑作品；
（五）摄影作品；
（六）电影作品和以类似摄制电影的方法创作的作品；
（七）工程设计图、产品设计图、地图、示意图等图形作品和模型作品；
（八）计算机软件；
（九）法律、行政法规规定的其他作品。
第十二条 改编、翻译、注释、整理已有作品而产生的作品，其著作权由改编、翻译、注释、整理人享有，但行使著作权时，不得侵犯原作品的著作权。
国家版权局版权管理司关于如何认定抄袭行为给X X 市版权局的答复
权司[1999]第6号
X X 市版权局：
收到你局关于认定抄袭行为的函。经研究，答复如下：
一、著作权法所称抄袭、剽窃，是同一概念（为简略起见，以下统称抄袭），指将他人作品或者作品的片段窃为己有。抄袭侵权与其他侵权行为一样，需具备四个要件：第一，行为具有违法性；第二，有损害的客观事实存在；第三，和损害事实有因果关系；第四，行为人有过错。由于抄袭物需发表才产生侵权后果，即有损害的客观事实，所以通常在认定抄袭时都指经发表的抄袭物。因此，更准确的说法应是，抄袭指将他人作品或者作品的片段窃为己有发表。
二、从抄袭的形式看，有原封不动或者基本原封不动地复制他人作品的行为，也有经改头换面后将他人受著作权保护的独创成份窃为己有的行为，前者在著作权执法领域被称为低级抄袭，后者被称为高级抄袭。低级抄袭的认定比较容易。高级抄袭需经过认真辨别，甚至需经过专家鉴定后方能认定。在著作权执法方面常遇到的高级抄袭有：改变作品的类型将他人创作的作品当作自己独立创作的作品，例如将小说改成电影；不改变作品的类型，但是利用作品中受著作权保护的成分并改变作品的具体表现形式，将他人创作的作品当作自己独立创作的作品，例如利用他人创作的电视剧本原创的情节、内容，经过改头换面后当作自己独立创作的电视剧本。
三、如上所述，著作权侵权同其他民事权利一样，需具备四个要件，其中，行为人的过错包括故意和过失。这一原则也同样适用于对抄袭侵权的认定，而不论主观上是否有将他人之作当作自己之作的故意。
四、对抄袭的认定，也不以是否使用他人作品的全部还是部分、是否得到外界的好评、是否构成抄袭物的主要或者实质部分为转移。凡构成上述要件的，均应认为属于抄袭。
以上意见，供参考。
国家版权局版权管理司
一九九九年一月十五日
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