Ken, I bet that is exactly what happened in your case.
Regarding so-called administrative plagiarism, it is not uncommon for individuals or committees of individuals who create policy statements for institutions to appropriate material from federal policies. Thus, institutional guidance on human research protections or on scientific integrity use verbatim language from OHRP and ORI respectively. This is probably most desirable for achieving universal agreement as to what might constitute, for example, human subjects research or research misconduct. I also know that in the IRB world institutions might also share individual policies on various aspects of their function. For example, in the IRB listserv that I belong to, it is not uncommon for IRB professionals who are working on policies, forms, and other administrative paperwork to ask and to receive sample language from their counterparts at other institutions. Regrettably, I think that sometimes these practices lead to the types of situations such as the one you encountered. What also bothers me about these practices is that the person doing the borrowing might not acknowledge the origin of the material being reused and the question arises as to whether practices similar to scholarly forms of attribution should be applied in these cases, particularly when this material appears on-line. Then, there are the situations where policy statements, forms, etc., created from scratch and available on-line at one institution suddenly appear on-line at other institutions, again, without attribution or, apparently, without permission. I have head of at least two cases of the latter type incident and, believe me, people are not happy when they realize that their work has been plagiarized without their knowledge. And if I may be allowed to promote my own work here, at the most recent EPA conference one of my students and I presented a poster describing how we googled language from 50 universities' plagiarism policies and found a total of 16 different institutional sites that contained identical or nearly identical language from these 50 universities and in no case was there any attribution. Again, should administrative language be subjected to similar scholarly rules of citation and attribution. I would say that, in some cases, yes. Miguel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Steele" <steel...@appstate.edu> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <tips@fsulist.frostburg.edu> Sent: Wednesday, October 6, 2010 8:58:45 PM Subject: Re: [tips] IRB Question Hi Miguel: I can't speak for Blaine's situation but I have worked with a variety of data sets. The situation I referred to involved data from which subject IDs were stripped at the moment of data collection. There was no way that I (as PI) could ever connect a person with his/her responses. In our case, my suspicion is that requirements were plagiarized (copied, lifted, borrowed) from another institution and the copiers lacked the understanding that the regulations made no sense. My personal (anecdotal) opinion is that this approach is happening frequently (as in the common response "I checked the UNC-Tweetsie IRB website and they do it" to a question of why a rule had a particular specification.) There is a lot of administrative plagiarism going along under the guise of "we do it because so-and-so does it." Ken --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=5459 or send a blank email to leave-5459-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
