Romanian Parliament Eyes National Scientific Works Register To Combat IP Violations

Romanian members of Parliament have submitted a draft bill to establish a national scientific works register to combat intellectual property violations and plagiarism. These are to include theses, dissertations, articles, papers and reports. The draft, prepared by MPs from all the parties present in the Parliament, says the register is to comprise all scientific works prepared by and defended at higher education institutions which receive public funds, including private institutions which obtain some forms of funding from the state budget. 

The draft legislation was submitted on 1 October by a group of 65 members of Parliament, and reported by local daily Unirea [available here, in Romanian].

Its cosponsors in the Parliament include MPs Mihai-Razvan Sturzu and Cornel George Comsa, who are members of the parliamentary groups of the country’s two leading parties, the ruling Social Democratic Party and the opposition National Liberal Party, respectively.

“We must work to ensure access to scientific content, develop a knowledge society and avoid plagiarism,” said MP Cornel George Comsa, one of the draft bill’s co-sponsors. “The register will include all scientific work on one public platform which could be accessed by anyone, free of charge. We are moving with small steps but confidently towards an open knowledge society in which, with the help of technology, we defend intellectual property and academic ethics.”

Comsa said that currently, there are many Romanian websites which enable illegal trade of scientific works, allowing students to purchase already published theses and dissertations which they can then try to defend under their own names. According to the MP, only such a central tool, and not separate anti-plagiarism systems operated by respective higher education institutions, could effectively allow to combat IP violations at national level.

At a 1 October press conference which accompanied the submission of the draft for further legislative works, Sturzu said the law is not to introduce new penalties for plagiarism.

“There already are relevant laws on this, and there are scientific institutions which enforce this,” Sturzu said [available here, in Romanian].

The lawmakers expect the costs of setting up the register to range between €200,000 (US$215,000) and €300,000 (US$322,000), including its maintenance.

Under the plan, the new register is to be operated as an open data source managed by Romania’s National Library. This is likely to raise doubts whether a database designed as a mean of combating plagiarism and safeguarding IP rights of Romanian authors should be developed as an open source solution which can be accessed without any constraints or requirements.

One of the potential criticisms that could be made regarding this project is that it would further facilitate copy-pasting scientific works and plagiarising them by placing all of the universities’ published works under one easily accessible address on the internet.

Meanwhile, the draft measure has been criticised by some leading representatives of Romania’s scientific circles who say that creating such a register is not the most effective way of combating plagiarism while protecting the scientists’ IP rights.

Razvan Constantin Bobulescu, an associate professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Bucharest and the honorary president of the country’s higher education institution employees’ trade union alma mater, told local media that the project could be difficult to successfully implement.

“Certainly, we can ensure better control of plagiarism in Romania. But I doubt whether we will have sufficient technical measures to make this happen,” Bobulescu said [available here, in Romanian].

Bobulescu said that Romanian decision-makers should consider setting up an independent body tasked with issuing decisions on whether a given work was plagiarised.

The institution’s proceedings should be transparent, but, instead of allowing all stakeholders to access all scientific works which were published with the use of public funds in Romania on an open source basis, this body would be provided privileged access to these works. This would allow Romanian authorities to avoid a situation in which they could be accused of facilitating IP violations through the creation of such an online database.

Under Romanian law, online piracy can be punished by prison sentences of between six months and three years, as well as fines of between RON 50,000 (US$11,300) and RON 300,000 (US$72,300), according to Art. 139 of the country’s authors’ rights law [available here, in Romanian].

Moreover, Bobulescu said that, in all cases of plagiarism, the promoters such be considered as equally guilty, in addition to their authors.

The political drive for combating plagiarism has further intensified in Romania following instances of notable local politicians who were accused of plagiarising their scientific works in the past years. In 2012, Romania’s then-Prime Minister Victor Ponta was accused of plagiarising more than half of his 432-page Ph.D. thesis on the International Criminal Court which he successfully defended at the University of Bucharest in 2003.

“The only reproach I have is that I did not list authors at the bottom of each page, but put them in the bibliography at the end,” Ponta reportedly told local journalists [available here, in English].

Romania’s National Ethics Council (NEC) rejected the plagiarism charges against the politician, but the university’s ethics commission reaffirmed the charges and stated that Ponta copy-pasted large sections of his Ph.D. thesis, as reported by Nature [available here, in English].

Although Ponta refused to resign, accusing his political rival, the country’s then-President Traian Basescu of plotting to hurt his reputation, the resulting scandal has placed combating plagiarism further up the country’s political agenda, as indicated by the recent developments.

 

Image Credits: Romanian Parliament