How To Handle Plagiarism

CopyPress has a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism (See our Plagiarism Policy).

How To See a Plagiarism Report

When an assignment gets flagged for possible plagiarism, the writer and editor will not be notified.

You will be able to access the plagiarism report inside the comment widget in the assignment window. When you click on the assignment, you'll see an alert notification at the top that says "Copyscape has found possible plagiarism. The results have been posted in the comments for review."

You can then access the report by clicking the "Comments" widget on the right toolbar. The message "Copyscape has found possible plagiarism. See (link) for more information." will direct you to the physical report from Copyscape.

Once you land on the physical Copyscape report, you can see all the resources that the assignment was flagged against. The threshold is set to 15% or more, so all results in this list should be a minimum of 15% copied in the assignment.

If you click on the link, it will show you the exact percentage of text that was copied in the assignment.

If you are a writer or influencer and your article is flagged for plagiarism, you must wait until your project manager reviews the assignment to decide what steps to take. Here are the possible outcomes:

1. You may receive an edit request to fix the plagiarized issues.
2. The article may be force-approved by the project manager, meaning you do not need to do anything.
3. The assignment may be reassigned, and you will be warned or fired without pay.

If you are the editor and the assignment has been flagged for plagiarism, you will need to wait until the project manager reviews the assignment and decides what steps to take. Here are the possible outcomes:

1. The assignment may be pushed back to the writer to rework, which means you may experience a delay in your task timeline.
2. The project manager force approves the writing task, meaning you can edit the content.
3. The assignment may be reassigned to a new writer, which means you may experience a delay in your task timeline.

How Project Managers Process Plagiarism

If the plagiarism scan detects possible duplication within an assignment, the project manager will receive an email notification. The notification email will include a link to the flagged assignment.

The project manager will review the possible plagiarism and determine if it warrants terminating the writer, sending it back for revisions, or pushing it forward to the editor.

If the project manager decides to send the article back to the original writer for revisions, they will request an edit and add the details in the comments box.

If the assignment is deemed plagiarized, the writer will be removed from the CopyPress community and will lose writing privileges. They will not be paid for any portion of the plagiarized work, and they may be held liable for damages resulting from the plagiarism.

What Is Considered Plagiarism?

Content has been intentionally plagiarized if:

• The writer has copied an entire sentence or paragraph from a previously published article.
• The writer has used major parts of a previously published article and changed only a few words in order to pass it off as their own.
• The writer reused their previously published work.
• The writer submitted work that is not unique and is a slight rewording of previous work.
• The writer rewrote an existing article by changing the order of the words and sequence of the paragraphs.
  • This is known as article spinning. The plagiarism check may not catch article spinning, so pay close attention to the resources the writer uses. If you think the article too closely matches a resource, notify your project manager immediately.
• The writer uses AI-created content.

Content is not considered plagiarized if the writer has used a basic phrase or small string of words (5 or fewer words) that has been previously published.

Writers, please be incredibly cautious. Not meaning to plagiarize is not an acceptable excuse. If you plagiarize, including self-plagiarizing, you will be removed from all CopyPress campaigns.