Urkund Software
According to a University Grants Commission (UGC) notice, all universities in India will get final subscription to access the Swedish anti-plagiarism software ‘Urkund’ from September 1, 2019.
Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
- The Urkund software was chosen through a global tender process.
- While Turnitin (US anti-plagiarism software) is more commonly used by global academics, it was found to be 10 times more expensive without a proportionate increase in features or reliability.
- The central government is following a two-pronged approach to prevent plagiarism.
- As a part of this process, in the coming years the software will be available free of cost to all 900 universities, including teachers, students and researchers.
- The Centre also notified the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 to prescribe the graded punishment for plagiarism.
UGC Panel on Improving Research Culture
- A UGC panel on improving research culture, headed by P. Balaram, noted that Indian academics have contributed 35% of all articles published in about 11,000 fake journals between 2010 and 2014.
- The panel found that most of these articles were in fake engineering journals, followed by articles in fake journals of biomedicine and social sciences.
- According to the panel report, primary responsibility to ensure high standards of academic research should lie with institutions themselves.
- Central rules and regulations can only complement the vigilant internal processes of institutions.
- The report submitted by the panel in July 2019 said that, ‘’Institutions must take the responsibility for ensuring academic standards and for emphasising, to both students and faculty, the importance of maintaining the highest standards of integrity in academic research.”