European Science Editing 51: e151110, doi: 10.3897/ese.2025.e151110
Authorship credit disputes should all be considered potential cases of plagiarism unless proven otherwise
Bor Luen Tang‡‡ National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Corresponding author: Bor Luen Tang ( bchtbl@nus.edu.sg ) Academic editor: Ksenija Bazdaric © Bor Luen Tang. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Tang BL (2025) Authorship credit disputes should all be considered potential cases of plagiarism unless proven otherwise. European Science Editing 51: e151110. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2025.e151110 |  |
Abstract
The US Office of Research Integrity (ORI)’s revised policy, which excludes authorship credit disputes from plagiarism, is potentially problematic because acts of intellectual property (IP) misappropriation, intended or otherwise, might potentially be exonerated from plagiarism or not adequately adjudicated as such. I argue that all authorship credit disputes should be considered as involving plagiarism unless it is clearly proven that there is no misappropriation of IP on the part of the alleged/respondent. This notion is important to prevent the prevalence of injustice due to power imbalances between senior and junior as well as between residential and tem-porary/departed researchers.
Keywords
Authorship dispute, intellectual property, plagiarism, research misconduct