Plagiarism and copyright: Best practices for classroom education

Plagiarism and copyright infringement are terms that most students are familiar with, and when asked, most students will readily express the sentiment that plagiarizing the work of others or committing copyright infringement is wrong. Despite students' basic understanding of these concepts, many struggle to put them into practice. Often this is a result of students not having enough knowledge about how to cite sources or how copyrighted works can legally be reused for scholarly purposes. This article identifies a way in which copyright and plagiarism can be taught as well as a process students can work through when addressing these issues.     

Machine learning techniques for XML (co-)clustering by structure-constrained phrases

A new method is proposed for clustering XML documents by structure-constrained phrases. It is implemented by three machine-learning approaches previously unexplored in the XML domain, namely non-negative matrix (tri-)factorization, co-clustering and automatic transactional clustering. A novel class of XML features approximately captures structure-constrained phrases as n-grams contextualized by root-to-leaf paths. Experiments over real-world benchmark XML corpora show that the effectiveness of the three approaches improves with contextualized n-grams of suitable length. This confirms the validity of the devised method from multiple clustering perspectives. Two approaches overcome in effectiveness several state-of-the-art competitors. The scalability of the three approaches is investigated, too.     

Seven steps to help you become more knowledgeable about U.S. copyright law

As copyright law is so closely ingrained with library services, it is important for librarians to learn about it and how to balance the law with the needs of users. Unfortunately, many Library and Information Science degree programs do not address copyright issues as part of course curriculum. As such, librarians may have to educate themselves about the law. This article will identify seven steps librarians can take to facilitate this process.     

Comparing Efficiency of Public Universities among European Countries: Different Incentives Lead to Different Performances

This paper analyses the relationship between the public funding systems of higher education in Italy and the Netherlands and their universities' performances. Empirically, an efficiency analysis on 13 Dutch and 58 Italian public universities is conducted. The findings show that the relative efficiency of Italian and Dutch universities is strongly influenced by the policy perspective adopted. If the goal is to realise the European goals and minimise resources employed for obtaining a high number of graduates, Dutch universities turn out to be more efficient. However, Italian universities are much more efficient if the priority is to minimise the costs for a given level of activity, such as number of students.     

Researching in school – creating a meaningful school/university alliance: a reflection

This paper reflects upon the experience of carrying out a piece of action research as a university academic, in partnership with a primary school. It considers roles and responsibilities, agendas, dynamics, ethical dilemmas and issues of voice. It contextualises the research within a field where educational research continues to be conceptualised as the ‘poor relation.’ In light of this, it explores the richness and value to be found in rejecting positivist tradition and re-imagining the research process as one of uniqueness and ‘dissensus’ whereby learning happens through collaborative shared-learning encounters. It concludes that research relationships such as these can illuminate new understandings in ways that are not only rich and enduring but often unforeseen.