Thankfully we’ve never had a problem with plagiarized work here at Dagan Books, but it does happen. An author thinks that they can steal sentences, paragraphs, or even whole stories, and pass it off as their own original work. Not a good author, of course, but someone convinced they can’t create anything better than what they could take from someone else.
In light of some recent problems at other publications, we’ve included a new clause in our contracts from here on out:
If the Publisher chooses to cancel publication of a story less than 30 days before the release of the anthology, for any reason other than having received evidence of plagiarism within the affected story, the Author will receive payment for the work, even though it will not be published. Evidence of plagiarism will render the story unpublishable, the Author will not be paid, and will further be prevented from working with Dagan Books in any capacity for a period of at least one calendar year from the date of notification.
We like transparency here at Dagan Books, so we’re sharing this clause with you. It’s also a warning, in its way. If we can prove that you even submitted something plagiarized to us, you’ll go on a “do not hire” list for a least a year. Depending on how egregious your use of someone else’s work, you may stay on that list indefinitely, and never be accepted for publication by us, ever again.
Hopefully this is simply a routine notice, and we won’t ever have to use it.
- Carrie Cuinn, Publisher
Hear hear. I always liked that where my husband did his post-grad degree, plagiarism resulted in a special feeling grade: XF. It was like a warning label reading “too stupid even to fail on one’s own merits.”
# An author thinks that they
# can steal sentences,
Sentences?! So doing shout-outs and references to your favorite works would be enough to get someone flagged?
Colum
Quoting from other works, with proper attribution, isn’t plagiarism.
I agree with the above comment. With proper attribution doing shout outs or references to other works isn’t plagerism. I also think that if are doing things like that an editor would catch it and realize that it isn’t a case of plagerism. Worse case you can always ask them how the want you to cite the reference to make sure you are safe.
Good on this Dagan Books for putting this out there. It is a great thing to have a publishing company be this transparent.