From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), said on Wednesday, that plagiarism is fast killing the quality and credibility of research works, hence it has taken measures to tackle it.
The Fund threatened to rise against any researcher, including Professors who is convicted of plagiarism in cause of his or her PhD thesis or other research works.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof. Suleiman Bogoro, who spoke at a capacity building workshop for Librarians, Directors of ICT, and Desk Officers, and other relevant staff from the benefiting institutions, in Abuja, said the process of digitization of PhD thesis and other research works has commenced.
He said: “The idea of this workshop is for us to come together to address key issues in our collective academic research output by bringing ICT and digitization to bear towards improving the quality of academic research output across our various beneficiary institutions.
“We want to dematerialize and digitize thesis and research projects across the public institutions. We have commenced with public institutions but may extend to private institutions. The world has gone digital and we can’t afford to continue to operate in analogue system.
“A number of research works at PhD and postgraduate levels are lost in the event of fire incident or any other form of destruction. But that will end soon when we are done with the digitization of the research works, save them in various forms at different repositories to make them easier to access and protected.
“Most importantly, it will assist us in the fight against plagiarism. That’s one of the major benefits of the digitization of the research works. We want to end plagiarism by researchers across all level including Professors.”
He maintained that digitizing academic research output will lead to increased access and innovation, thus accelerating the journey between research and commercial application, an effort that is critical to secure the contributions of fledgling research base to productivity, growth, and social benefits.
He reminded the participants that some of the most significant advancements started as postgraduate thesis before achieving commercial success.
“Just think of the technological giant, Google, which started as an academic research project. Their early work is still today properly digitized, citied, and referenced many times over. The benefits of digitizing our academic output will truly yield dividends beyond our imagination.”
The Deputy Director, Educational Support Services, Kolapo Okunlola, in his presentation, disclosed that two billion pages of thesis and other research works produced in the last 10 years will be digitalized in the first phase of the exercise.
He explained that the funding for the digitization will be drawn from TETFund financial disbursements to benefiting institutions.
He, thereby, solicited the support of the institutions to ensure that impressive success is recorded within the timeframe allotted for the project.