© MARK AIRS/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMThe National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on March 8 that it is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism in a year’s worth of agency-funded proposals. Though the amount of funding dished out to these projects is unclear, extrapolating from the NSF’s 2011 budget, it could represent more than $96 million.
Unfortunately, the problem isn’t limited to the NSF. Retractions in academic publishing have skyrocketed—up 10-fold in the past three decades—with plagiarism and duplication (a kind of self-plagiarism) at the root of about 25 percent of those retractions. In the same month that the NSF launched its investigation into the suspect proposals, primatologist Jane Goodall’s forthcoming book was delayed by publishers after early reviewers discovered plagiarized passages.
Outside of academia the problem of plagiarism continues to generate headlines and scandals for politicians. In Germany, two prominent cabinet members have been forced to step down due to allegations of plagiarism in their doctoral dissertations. Meanwhile, in Canada, the head of the nation’s largest school district was forced to resign in the face of plagiarism allegations, and plagiarism ...
