January 14, 2007

Some hypothetical questions. What do you do?

  • What do you do when your research is plagiarised, copied, taken away from you?
  • What do you do if colleagues, managers, supervisors, the university ignored your IPR and they put their dirty hands in your research work?

  • What do you say, or do when your contribution to research work is ignored? When your ideas are taken away from you without our consent?

  • What if you were denied the opportunity to become an innovative researcher due to your own work?

  • Do you tell them to 'take off?' Wouldn’t this be ‘professional suicide’?

  • Do you raise a formal complaint about them? Wouldn’t this also be ‘professional suicide’? What are your chances of success?

  • And how would you feel if others ‘progressed’ at the back of your research, while you are caught in a formal complaint’s procedure that could cost you your job?

  • Do you resign, or do you fight back?

  • Do you say nothing and do nothing? Can this save your job?

  • What do you do? Can you do anything about it?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You fight back with the support of colleagues on blogs like this who provide the necessary knowledge that is often witheld by those whose role is to support you...

You fight back because if you are silent or walk away you are colluding with the bullying.

Those of you who are silent witnesses...

Your turn may come...

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said...

It is injustice not to fight back bullying. The silent collaborators will have to live their lives, with the shame that this entails...

Anonymous said...

Plagiarism should be considered a criminal offence. Plagiarists should be considered criminally active.

The impacts on the plagiarised can vary from being stuck in the past and becoming mentally paralysed to ruining the complainant's academic reputation and isolating her/him from the wider academic community, not only isolating her/him within the same institution.

Complaining each time is placing the complainant at a risk of being branded a liar and increasingly being viewed as a trouble maker, while the plagiarists can simply resort to execuses such as a "mistake has been made" and "oversight". It is our healths and careers that are being damaged.

Some of us are branded as "petty" and "particular"

What happened to Michael Pyshnov is criminal. What is happening to many of us is criminal.

We need an independent committee of academics to investigate plagiarism cases.

Anonymous said...

You can try to fight back but be honest with yourself about what is happening to your health and to your life and relationships outside the workplace. Remaining in such toxic environments can make a person very ill, if it does not break you altogether. Know that the longer it goes on and the more you fight, the more vicious the other side will become. Things are starting to turn around in the academic unit where I work, but it may be too late for me. I've been on disability leave and doubt my ability to function in the workplace anymore. All my best wishes to you.