One of the latest creations to emerge from the Research Institute’s lab, Apograf is an interactive platform that houses an extensive collection of scientific publications and is building a mechanism for incentivising peer review. Apograf’s vision is to provide a high-quality, secure, and transparent source of scientific papers — an alternative to the traditional publication and distribution of scientific scholarship.
Apograf exists because the world of scientific publishing has some deeply ingrained problems — problems like concentrated power, high fees, a lack of transparency, broken incentives, unfriendly UX, the misreporting of data and research findings, fabrication of results and experiments, and outright plagiarism. Some of these issues can not only slow down the publishing progress but undermine the core values of science.
Each problem is, of course, unique both in terms of causation and potential solutions. To highlight one in particular, plagiarism has become a common concern in scientific publishing and academia, with universities, individual researchers, journals and grant-making organisations continually facing the negative consequences of duplication or improper citation. This is true almost irrespective of the discipline.
According to a research summary by the Institute of Social Medicine at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, “plagiarism of other people’s ideas, research results, parts or whole published articles is a particularly significant problem in publishing and scientific research in general.” The paper continues, “in the last three decades, more attention is being paid to misconduct and fraud in science and publishing, and developing approaches, policies and information programs for their detection and punishment, overcoming and prevention.”
While some progress has been made, work remains to be done. Whether plagiarism takes the form of stealing code, duplication, self-plagiarism or even accidental plagiarism, the results can be significant. And, of course, within these categories, there are degrees of severity and formulating strategies for detecting and responding to them has become a priority — at this point, any library or database without rigorous fraud controls is of dubious value.
As a home for authoritative scientific content, Apograf is combating plagiarism and fraud by using the Unicheck open API. Unicheck is sophisticated, AI-charged plagiarism detection software that is trusted by millions of users worldwide. By having Unicheck embedded in the system, every piece of content on the Apograf platform is combed through by Unicheck algorithms. In this way, users can know that all content is authentic and that the platform has the ability to flag and remove any unoriginal content — making sure it never becomes a purveyor of copied ideas. This is especially important for a platform like Apograf because its database includes not only original publications, but also pulls from thousands of unique online content hosting locations, including OA journals, hybrid journals, institutional repositories, and disciplinary repositories. In casting such a wide net, it’s imperative to have a robust filtering process in place to ensure the quality of content.
Apograf is proud to be working with Unicheck to combat plagiarism, an important part of its wider mission: pursuing the establishment of an open, fair, and accessible scientific research ecosystem.
