Plagiarism on the rise

A plagiarism policy, issued by ACM's publication board, to help in reducing the disturbing increase in occurrences of plagiarism in computer science and engineering, is discussed. Plagiarism is the verbatim copying, near-verbatim copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's paper. Penalties for plagiarism depend upon the extent of the copying and the stage at which it is discovered. In the case of substantially plagiarized articles discovered in the ACM Digital Library after publication, ACM removes access to the full text of the article from the DL, replacing it with a notice that the article was plagiarized and pointing to the original article. The offending author is to write a letter of apology to ACM and the original author. For plagiarism discovered before publication, the article can be corrected or immediately rejected depending upon the extent of the infraction.