Online Articles: Where Do They Go?
There are websites that provide excellent platforms for authors to publish articles to express their views on various topics. They offer support and encouragement to help produce high-quality work that will attract many readers. Not only are authors helped to build a reputation, but links to the author’s website are also provided to enable interested readers to learn more or access quality products and services. Articles may also be copied and reproduced on other websites under guidelines known as the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Everything is fine as long as the policy is followed, but unfortunately there are many cases where it is not, and pirated copies are used to promote other authors or other websites, or to boost sales of rival products.
The present author recently produced a series of articles on silk dresses and plus size issues to help a friend who sells Vietnamese silk dresses in Europe. These articles were well received and attracted clicks to the corresponding website. However, the articles were quickly copied on other websites offering plus size silk dresses, some with correct attribution and some without. One was found that provided a link to the original article, but two others reproduced the article with a new author name. While this may testify to the quality of an article, it is certainly not acceptable use.
Perhaps the most annoying misuse of an author’s work is when one finds their article reproduced in some corrupt language, perhaps in an attempt to make it understood by people who only speak basic English or a local dialect. The present author has found one African and two Asian websites that have mutilated articles in this way. In such cases, you certainly don’t want to retain attribution, but you do need to control the practice.
The present author has the experience of publishing more than two hundred articles and finding them copied more than three hundred times, an average of one and a half times for each article! Even if not all of them were transferred to other websites, one must suspect that considerable bleeding is taking place. This would reflect well on both the author and the publishing website if it were done in accordance with the AUP, but in many cases this is not the case. Individual cases of abuse can be pursued through the system by perpetrators, but this is time consuming and piecemeal. Even finding the offending websites is difficult. As the number of instances runs into the hundreds, there are inevitably many that go unnoticed or unresolved. Something needs to be done to provide more effective control.
Third parties seem to be able to take articles and adapt them to their own ends, changing the attribution and even mutilating the text. This could be avoided, for example, if articles could be copied only in some form of “read-only” format, including attribution. Until something like this is possible, authors will continue to suffer at the hands of unscrupulous website owners who are willing to ignore the Acceptable Use Policy.