KATHMANDU, August 3: Tribhuvan University Service Commission (TUSC), the staff recruiting body for the university, has taken the issue of plagiarism seriously and is considering measures to check it. A number of university lecturers , who are competing for promotions or for other opportunities, are frequently reported to have copied from research papers published by others.

However, such plagiarism goes unchecked due to lack of stricter regulations."It is a very serious issue in the academic world here," said Prof. Chaitanya Prasad Sharma, chairperson of TUSC. "We need to strengthen the regulatory system to discourage plagiarism," he added.Candidates for promotion to professor are evaluated under 200 marks . Out of these 200 marks, publications account for 32 marks, with 3 marks awarded for each article published in an international journal. Tribhuvan University (TU) is soon going to reduce the total marks to 100, including 21 for publications , according to sources.

According to TUSC, a three-member evaluation committee of professors and experts is being formed to look into the promotion procedures. "The recommendations of the evaluation committee will be binding on all," said Prof Sharma. "Plagiarized content might not have been detected properly due to lack of examining tools," he added."We are planning to use anti-plagiarism software, and we might also expand the three-member evaluation committee to five members," he further said.

Meanwhile, Kanhaiya Sapkota, associate professor at the Central Department of Geography at TU, has been found to have plagiarized a research paper .

In 2006, he copied from an article written by Ferit Kilickaya, associate professor at the Middle East Technical University and Mehmet Akif Ersoy University in Turkey.Without taking permission or giving any citation, Khaniya extracted text from the article for his paper titled 'Use of authentic materials in EFL classrooms'. The paper was duly published in the journal of the Nepal English Language Teachers Association (NELTA).

 
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