By Sierra Pawlak

During the July 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on the topic of plagiarism, Micki Caskey, a Professor Emerita at Portland State University, shared her experience with having her work plagiarized.

“It was a shock to me that my work had been taken,” she said. “The reason I cared is because I worked really hard on that project. This was work I had committed a lot of intellectual space to, and I just was aghast that someone would take it. It’s not that I am the greatest author in the world, I just would like to be credited for the work that I’ve done.”

Caskey discovered her work had been plagiarized in 2021 when she went to update a piece she originally wrote in 2007 and had updated in 2014, a research summary on the developmental characteristics of young adolescents.

“I put in some of the words that I used when I was developing the 2014 research summary into Google, and I found that my entire sentence had been plagiarized,” she shared. “When I dug a little deeper, I found an entire paragraph had been plagiarized, and when I went further, I found an entire chapter had been plagiarized. They took my research summary and stripped out all the citations that I had meticulously searched for, and they used all the text word for word, verbatim.” She said that the plagiarized book chapter was published in 2019, and she didn’t discover it until 2021, so someone had also profited from her work.

Caskey answered some questions I and others participating in the Conversation Circle posed about her experience:

What steps can you take to find out if your work has been plagiarized?

“I think it’s pretty straightforward,” she said. “In fact, if you take a sentence out of any of your work that’s a key sentence, like a topic sentence that has some key terms in it, and you do a search for it in Google or any of the other search engines that you use a lot, I think you’ll find if anybody has taken your words verbatim.”

What can you do after you find out your work has been plagiarized? Who do you contact?

Caskey said that reaching out to the publisher of the plagiarized work was “fruitless”, so she next reached out to her publisher, who developed a cease-and-desist letter with the help of an attorney. They sent it to the publisher of the plagiarized work, which resulted in it being taken off the market. “The cease-and-desist letter was effective,” she said. “We didn’t get a response, but we got the material removed from the website and removed from being sold any longer. It was very satisfying when I saw that the work had been taken down.”

“[The plagiarized] textbook was printed and developed in another country, and they probably don’t have the same standards that we do, although I’m sure they have some plagiarism standards,” added Caskey. “I didn’t seek any kind of remuneration. All I wanted them to do was to stop using my work.”

How long was the process between finding the plagiarism and getting it resolved?

Caskey said it was a “very long process.” It took about six months before the cease-and-desist letter was sent from her publisher’s attorney to the publisher of the plagiarized textbook, and about three months after that until it came down.

“I had to negotiate back and forth with my publisher and had to send them specific evidence,” she said. “I took screenshots of the chapter, and I took screenshots of my own work, which was published on my publisher’s website, so then they could compare. Then they discussed it for a while among themselves. Working with attorneys takes a while, to develop the letter, to have it vetted, and then to send it. It’s a legal document, so I’m sure there’s a lot of vetting before it leaves their house and goes to the publisher.”

 Do You Have any Advice for Preventing Plagiarism?

“I’ve been in the habit since that time, even on my PowerPoint slides, of putting my name and a copyright symbol and the date of the work, to try to keep people from just using it without asking my permission, or at least giving me attribution for the work,” said Caskey. “We put so much out there for people to use.”

For more information on this topic, read “Plagiarism vs. Copyright: What’s the Difference?” by Brenda Ulrich, Intellectual Property Attorney, Archstone Law Group, PC.