Ideas, Integrity & Injustice
Interview on the Original Minds, Rightful Credit campaign
Having launched the Original Minds, Rightful Credit campaign back in February, between now and then our team has gathered insights on how issues including research plagiarism, intellectual property theft, and misappropriation are harming research in science, technology, and wider STEM, and design and innovation in the United Kingdom.
Having kicked off with a survey, we gathered a series of case studies that document the causations and effects of the origination of ideas being misattributed across all classes of intellectual property - from registered and unregistered design rights to trademarks, patents, and copyright, as well as moral rights. Our findings suggest that these problems are not merely a product of individual actions, but of systemic failings within and beyond some institutions.
Having gathered a growing community of supporters, including a leading UK IP law firm, and campaign groups with shared interests and aims, as autumn unfolds we’re rolling out the next phase of the campaign. More news on that will follow very soon. But, in the meantime, I gave an interview on our campaign and why I consider it imperative to address the issues it deals with.
The business of pioneering seminal ideas and discoveries is difficult enough, without credit being misattributed, and our team is dedicated to using our collective agency to push back against the growing tide and help foster fairness in the fields we work in and with.
If you are or have worked on the origination of ideas in STEM, design and innovation in or with a UK-based project, and you’ve experienced the problem of research plagiarism, IP theft, or misappropriation, please do get in touch with our team. We’re still gathering case studies, and we have more surveys coming soon. All these and more will inform a whitepaper we’ll be publishing in the months ahead, as well as discussions we’ll be leading in and beyond policymaking, press and media.
Extract
“Why does this campaign matter so deeply to you? What is it that you are trying to confront and ultimately change?
Put simply, the problem of dealing with research plagiarism, IP theft, and mis-appropriation has become an increasingly familiar territory for many of us that work at the coalface of discovery and innovation. Though these issues are nothing new, the speed and the scale at which they are now populating research and its outputs is, and that’s doing harm on multiple fronts.
The harms done aren’t just to individuals, but to entire disciplines, industries, and even economies.
New and emerging technologies have made it much easier to not only copy ideas, and rapidly, but to promote at scale as well. When intellectual property was plagiarised, stolen, and otherwise mis-used in the last century, it typically took months if not years, to reach global audiences. Today, an IP can be taken instantaneously, and shared with such speed that audiences can multiply millions in a matter of days. That does all kinds of harm, from stripping credit, funds, and opportunities more generally away from those with the talents and skills to craft genuinely novel solutions to enabling those that lack integrity and ethics in their research and wider conduct to obscuring the conditions in which genuinely original ideas emerge.
Though our campaign is principally concerned with research integrity and ethics, it touches on wider issues including such things as the absence of diligence in such things as editorial and publishing, in granting of funding and investment, and more. Credit matters, it matters greatly, because its absence can undermine the extent to which someone can further their research works, and vice versa. As a society – do we want to see those that originate discoveries, inventions and innovators do well, or do we want to see people that take their ideas and pass them off as their own do well? And, if the former, what are we going to do to ensure that happens, and not the latter?”
Read the interview in full here.