Future Challenges and Plagiarism

As a site that regularly presents unique views from around the world, we pride ourselves on producing original content that is both interesting and informative.

Pen and Paper / By Rick Payette / Used under Creative Commons BY NC ND

We were recently alerted to a few instances of plagiarism on Future Challenges. The plagiarized content has already been taken down or given proper attribution. This issue is important to us, and we wanted both to let you, our readers, know about it and how we intend/plan to prevent plagiarism in the future.

Because the Future Challenges team is based in Europe and the United States, we are using the European/American understanding of plagiarism, which is very narrow and precise: any words borrowed from another author must be fully and clearly cited.

Plagiarism occurs whenever an author takes someone else’s words and uses them, either as-is or with slight modifications, in their own text without giving proper credit. If anyone else’s words are used – one phrase, one sentence, one paragraph, one post – from somewhere else, Future Challenges’ policy is that the borrowed passage must be properly and generously cited and linked back to the original work.

Similarly, data and facts that are not common knowledge must be properly cited.

Any images or graphics used must also be cited clearly and completely under a Creative Commons license.

As of mid-July 2013, we have recently reviewed our site to check for other instances of plagiarism. In this review, we found no further such instances. We want to emphasize that we value the original perspectives and voices of our bloggers around the world. We are working hard to train our authors and emphasize our policies in order to prevent this from happening in the future.

Please contact the Future Challenges Team with any questions or comments. We’re always looking to make Future Challenges a more informative, inclusive platform, and all feedback is welcome!