Strategies and responses to plagiarism in Slovakia

The rapid increase in the number of higher education institutions (HEI), students, ICT and internet penetration after 1989 and a low level of copyright and intellectual property rights awareness contributed to the growth of plagiarism at HEIs in Slovakia. In 2008, the Ministry of Education decided to establish a common national repository for bachelor, master, dissertation, rigorous and habilitation theses. The amendment to the HEI Act dated 2009 stipulates that every thesis or dissertation of a HEI operating under the Slovak legal order shall be sent to the central repository and undergo the originality check before it is defended. The originality check of every new thesis is made against the national repository, as well as against other resources, primarily the internet ones. From 2010 to the end of March 2013, more than 235 thousand theses and dissertations have gone through this process. The quality of the solution (organisational and technical) meets the expectations and has a positive impact on the academic community. This paper describes the implementation of the Central Repository of Theses and Dissertations and of the Plagiarism Detection System into practice and the experience from their operation. It also analyses the impacts of the implementation on HEIs, feedback and reactions of the academia and the public, and provides recommendations regarding the prevention and detection of plagiarism. It also addresses the growth in the number of internet texts and texts in media containing the term plagiátorstvo (plagiarism) and the growth of search hits (search frequency) for this term in the period 2002-2012.