August 28, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
What do you do if someone steals your writing on the Internet?
Hildy Gottlieb, president of Help 4 Nonprofits, a consulting group in Tucson, Ariz., has posted suggestions on how to prevent such a problem after she had an article plagiarized.
On her blog
and organization’s Web site,
Ms. Gottlieb describes how an assistant professor at a well-known university lifted an article in 2005 that she wrote on managing nonprofit boards and published it in the American School Board Journal, a prestigious academic publication in Alexandria, Va. (Ms. Gottlieb did not discover the plagiarism until this year.)
After contacting the editor of the journal and making her case, Ms. Gottlieb was vindicated. This month, the journal’s editor apologized to readers for the copied article and wrote that the assistant professor said it was an “honest mistake.”
To protect your online work, Ms. Gottlieb recommends registering a copyright with the U.S. Register of Copyrights and stating your group’s reprint policy for articles on its Web site. She also suggests that if you are posting a blog item from an outside contributor that you check to make sure it is original.
What do you think? What suggestions do you have to protect writings from plagiarism? With the growing number of nonprofit bloggers, will copied articles be a problem in the future? Click on the comments link below to share your thoughts.
