I suspect I'm being either hopelessly naive, or missing the obvious (or even both), but why go to a vanity publisher if you just want to get your book out where it will be read? Why not just make a free download? Not even my mother would ever want to buy a copy of my diss, (knock on wood, I should live so long, etc.) but for the three people who might want it, I see no reason to make them pay for it, nor any point in paying someone to publish the wretched thing. (And yes, I know about University Microfilm, but that still costs too much.) I'll put it online. I'll likely at least put it in .pdf form, making future plagiarists have to do a bit of work, but I see no value being offered by vanity presses, and though scholarly publishing does have added value, the books, while worthwhile, are too much for the average scholar to afford.
Why bother with a vanity press? I very much doubt that their sales would match the numbers of downloads, and it's much much cheaper, if you really just want to be read, to go digital. And no, based on what I've seen, the editorial services of Publish America or The Writer's Collective (yes, I've looked at books from both) are not worth paying for.
So why?
Scott Spiegelberg writes:
Professors, instructors, and TAs are not hired to be detectives or law enforcers. We are hired to impart our knowledge about specific disciplines and the general concept of learning to the students.
Agreed, up to a point. Most of the plagiarism I've seen has been by the English majors in large classes. do consider it part of my job to watch out for plagiarism. Some of it is honestly inadvertent, some of it is ignorance, and some of it deliberate cheating. I'm not going to spend hours looking for a source, but if I spot suspicious text, I'll type a few unusual phrases in Google. I won't spend more than ten minutes or so searching. I'll pass the paper to my fellow T.A.s (we frequently catch identical submissions this way) and I'll show it to the instructor of record, who has the ultimate responsibility for the course. At that point, if we don't have a source but are still suspicious about the paper, I'll talk to the student about what the paper says. Sometimes the student has genuinely written the paper. Often the student can't even explain the argument, or how it was developed, since it isn't his (or hers) to begin with. They usually admit to plagiarism then. Depending on what the instructor of record wants to do, if we don't have an admission of guilt, but we still doubt it's the student's work, we may take the student and the paper to the Dean. After that point, we don't really have anything to do with the process. It's up to the Dean.
Scott wrote:
Because we give grades that have a certain material value, we do our best to ensure fairness, but our first concern should always be in the content we deliver and the the way we deliver it. If we spend more time checking for plagiarism, we have to spend less time in other areas, such as giving comments to students, planning lessons, and doing our own research. Which is more important?
There I disagree. Part of my job is to teach potential future scholars about academic culture, and about academic writing, and that includes teaching them not to plagiarize, and how to cite. I would also argue that the kind of sensitivity to text and style and voice that we employ in identifying possible plagiarism is a basic skill for humanist scholars and part of what we should be learning to apply to any text, whether it's part of our research or not. There's also the original idea of the medieval university, a union of scholars, and I don't see plagiarists having a place in that union.
I'm not a policeman, but I'm not going to ignore it either.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 3 |
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