PANJIM, MARCH 1
Goa University (GU) will join a league of Indian universities that has embarked on the mission to curb increasing trend of plagiarism of PhD thesis.
Dr Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network), an initiative of UGC, said that GU will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with them.
As a part of MoU, the anti-plagiarism software will be installed in GU, which will enable it to have access to various PhD thesis. The University will also have to upload its thesis in D-mat format on the software.
The director said that currently there are 1250 thesis online which are uploaded in the D-mat format. Goa University has 468 thesis which will now be the part of the data base.
Arora was talking to the press on the eve of 8th international Caliber 2011 (Convention on Automation of Libraries in Education and Research) conference schedule to begin at NIO auditorium Dona Paula from March 2 to March 4.
He said that in all 14 universities have already signed a MoU and more are in pipeline. UGC chairman has already asked all the universities to be the part of the initiative, which will act as a deterrent for the plagiarism in the PhD thesis.
Arora opined that plagiarism has been a prime worry for the academicians. Till now the data extending upto bibliography of the thesis is available for the academicians while the research details are not accessible through conventional systems.
“At times, there are several PhDs on the same subject. For instance there are 300 thesis on writer Nirala (Suryakant Tripathi) and even four thesis on Shoba De’s writings,” Arora said pointing out to the complex problems in the tracking of the plagiarism.
“The issue is that you just don’t know whether same thesis is already worked on. The guide just certifies it as a virgin topic,” he said adding that once thesis is available online the students themselves will be able to know whether someone has copied their research.
He said that INFLIBNET’s initiative of `shodhganga’ does not only help to track down the thesis but also enables online submission of thesis and dissertations by research scholars in the digital repository set up.
UGC’s another ambitious initiative `National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for scholarly content’ (N-LIST) is also proving beneficial to several thousand colleges.
Arora said that the project can benefit 6,000 colleges but till now 1150 colleges are connected and they are having access to 51,000 electronic books and 2,100 Journals.
In a similar initiative, the journal ‘Chemical Abstracts’ which was published since the year 1900 will be available to the college libraries through innovative programme Sci Finder Scholar.
