Last week, senior specialist Ulla Tiililä brought up an interesting case: her organization’s web copy, along with her own article, was plagiarized in a column that appeared in Talouselämä magazine. When Tiililä reported about this, she documented her case with highlighted images showing several identical or nearly identical passages.
The opening of the Talouselämä column is copied directly from the website. In the next section, the column deals with a Vaasa University research which Tiililä discussed in her own article. And in the final section the columnist used Tiililä’s original example with a few numbers updated. All in all, the column essentially repeated Tiililä’s work. There was no acknowledgement of her as the author until after she’d contacted the magazine.
This is not the first time that an expert’s work was misappropriated. The “borrower” builds a story, but the material is all someone else’s. With luck, that expert will find his name attached to a brief quote. More often, the original author is left out entirely, as happened to Tiililä. Unfair, and unethical.