Grendel's Lair : Integrity

grendel.org | Grendel's Lair | Papers | Credibility, plagiarism and honesty
grendel.org is well aware that online publication suffers from a lack of verifiable credibility as well as the risk that material may be easily plagiarized in a manner that is currently difficult to detect. We have taken several measures for our "Papers" site to decrease these risks and hence to make our resource more helpful. Our efforts break down into efforts at credibility, efforts against plagiarism, and clear explanation of fair use of our material.

Credibility

The ease of online publishing makes bad material easy to get to and difficult to distinguish. At present, we neither have the resources to create a full publication (with editorial board, etc.) nor the focus in that direction, though we may go there soon. We have, however, taken several steps:

  1. All submissions are read by the site maintainer, Scott Price, and filtered as he may. This is a minimal "editorial process", but it is not auto-submission. Pieces are not accepted that do not have reasonable citation.
  2. Material is noted by original publication. "papers" have been verified to have been submitted for an academic course (with a passing grade) and the institution is listed in the paper info. "Online Essays" were found on the web, and the author has permitted re-publication. "Discussion topics" are links to partiularly lucid comments on our discussion boards, and are only minimally filtered.
  3. Easy access to the editor through e-mail links make commentary easy; commentary against particular pieces will be considered and may result in the piece being removed. At the least, arguments against pieces will be posted and linked in the discussion boards.
  4. We are here providing links to pages on tips for verifying credibility of online material:

So, can you cite this material?If we move toward a more formal journal, then citation would be quite safe. However, at present, you should ask the teacher/professor that you will give work to about online material, verify it yourself, and be careful with proper citation.

Plagiarism

The danger that our site may become a "paper mill" is great. This is unfortunately a part of being on the web at present. Effective methods against plagiarism cannot aim at restricting access without destroying their goal; instead, we need to focus on making the academic community aware of how to verify originality. grendel.org has taken several steps in this:

  1. As we have found them, we have announced our presence to faculty with related work. The list is constantly growing as we find new people and look at more related fields. If you or someone you know would like more info about this site, either direct them here or send us their address with a note about their relevance.
  2. We seek to promote knowledge of services like that at plagiarism.org, which are developing methods of analyzing originality of electronic documents, and to encourage professors to look into these services. We do not endorse any single such service provider at present.

Fair Use

Our Copyright and Fair Use Clause explains how to legitimately use material in this site. Authors with work here have acknowledged these guidelines, and readers should look them over to understand where we are coming from. We also have a page on online citation.

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