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Canada's CBC: "Plagiarism did occur, and it wasn?t detected"

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

IPBiz covered plagiarism issues in a flap over a report on copyright by the Conference Board of Canada in an earlier post.
[ see The Great Canadian Cut-and-Paste Caper]. What is refreshing to see is, that in the aftermath, the people in Canada tackled the issue head-on, rather than inventing some sophomoric concept like "inadvertent plagiarism" to cover their tracks.

Straight.com discussed a report on the matter by the Conference Board of Canada:

Plagiarism did occur, and it wasn?t detected due to insufficient oversight of this project.

The evidence indicates there was undue reliance on feedback from a funder who was deemed to have important technical expertise. We failed to seek similar feedback from a broad range of stakeholders. The report relied heavily on too few sources and lacked sufficient balance. Moreover, the reports did not follow our internal quality review process. Overall, there was inadequate monitoring of this entire project.

The text We failed to seek similar feedback from a broad range of stakeholders. The report relied heavily on too few sources and lacked sufficient balance. would describe efforts of Congress (specifically those of Howard Berman) in patent reform 2007.

Returning to Canada, changes were proposed:

We have already taken steps to further strengthen our rigorous quality review process to prevent future incidents of this nature. We have added new quality control steps including: using anti-plagiarism software at multiple stages in the process, additional review by external challengers, and engagement of senior management earlier in the research process.

Southern Illinois University could benefit from this approach.

Full post as published by IPBiz on June 21, 2009 (boomark / email).