UGC plans e-thesis to stop PhD plagiarism and increase access

This is seen to be in line with the international trend to preserve and centrally maintain repositories of electronic theses and make them generally accessible.

A UGC expert committee has prepared a ‘‘Draft Regulation for Submission of Metadata and Full Text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format,’’ which is open to public review till June 15.

Once the regulation takes effect, all universities would be mandated to ‘‘set-up an e-theses repository to facilitate e-submission, archiving, maintenance and access to these repositories at the University and also at a national repository at a website designated by the UGC.’’

The Electronic Theses Database will have an in-built software to detect plagiarised passages in documents, which would examine files submitted for verification by matching words in phrases of specified minimum length.

‘‘When the software finds matching files that share enough words in a number of phrases, a report is generated which contains the document text with the matching phrases underlined. Widespread use of such software packages would increase risks of detection and, therefore, plagiarism,’’ the UGC Draft Regulation notes.