New Delhi: The University Grants Commission has released the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations 2018 to curb Plagiarism in academic and research activities.

Now universities and colleges shall declare and implement the technology based mechanism using appropriate software so as to ensure that documents such as thesis, dissertation, publications or any other such documents are free of plagiarism at the time of their submission.

The software shall be made accessible to all engaged in research work including student, faculty, researcher and staff etc.

As per the Prevention of Plagiarism Regulations 2018, every student submitting a thesis, dissertation, or any other such documents to the HEI shall submit an undertaking indicating that the document has been prepared by him or her and that the document is his/her original work and free of any plagiarism.

Further, each supervisor shall submit a certificate indicating that the work done by the researcher under him / her is plagiarism free.

Levels of Plagiarism & Penalties:  Plagiarism would be quantified into following levels in ascending order of severity for the purpose of its definition:

Level 0: Similarities upto 10% – Minor Similarities, no penalty.

Level 1: Similarities above 10% to 40% – Such student shall be asked to submit a revised script within a stipulated time period not exceeding 6 months.

Level 2: Similarities above 40% to 60% – Such student shall be debarred from submitting a revised script for a period of one year.

Level 3: Similarities above 60% -Such student registration for that programme shall be cancelled.

Higher Educational Institutes (HEI) shall submit to INFLIBNET soft copies of all Masters, Research program’s dissertations and thesis within a month after the award of degrees for hosting in the digital repository under the “Shodh Ganga e-repository”.

HEI shall create Institutional Repository on institute website which shall include dissertation / thesis / paper / publication and other in-house publications.