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Students Fight Plagiarism, Earn Profits
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By
Stefanie Shaffer
9 March 2006
While most students view writing research papers as a tedious chore, four college entrepreneurs looked at the situation as a great business opportunity instead. Beginning as a small investment to deter high school and college students from plagiarizing others’ works, WorksCited4U.com has since morphed into a lucrative venture for its creators.
University of Maryland students Ben Solof and Steve Grella, University of Pennsylvania student Todd Rubin and New York University student Abhi Patel started the website in 2003 while attending high school together in Syosset, N.Y. While writing papers they had learned first-hand of the tedium that accompanied properly citing research materials and decided to create a site that would make the process quick and painless.
"A student will often decide it’s worth it to risk a remote chance of punishment if it means cutting down the time spent on the paper significantly by ’stealing material’ and not citing sources," Solof said. "Our site allows students to cut down on the time spent on the paper because it encourages them to cite sources in our user-friendly, pain-free method of automatic [Modern Language Association] citation."
PLAGIARISM PROBLEMS
Plagiarism is a rampant problem at high schools, colleges and universities across the country. Plagiarism.org, an anti-plagiarism resource, cites an Education Week survey in which 54 percent of students admitted to plagiarizing from the Internet.
While students may be expelled or failed for stealing another’s words, the legal implications are even harsher. Fines for plagiarism can range from $100 to $50,000 and a year in jail, according to Turnitin.org, an online resource used to scour academic and professional works for plagiarized material.
After spending about $500 to get the site running – which included fees for coding, domain purchase and payment for hosting – it only costs the students about $725 a year to maintain the site, $60 a month for a dedicated server and $5 a year for the domain name.
The website’s coding allows users to input information for more than 20 types of sources – such as works of music, books with multiple authors and maps – and automatically formats it into the proper style commonly used in bibliographies.
MAKING MONEY
In order to build revenue, the students teamed up with AdSense, an advertising program run by the Google search engine that places targeted ads on each page of a website for a small fee. The ads content relates to text featured on the page and every time a reader clicks an ad link, the site’s owner gets paid.
Though they are unable to disclose exactly how much they make from AdSense, the group claims to bring in more than 15 times the amount they spend on site maintenance per year.
The site’s creators hope eventually to include Chicago Manual of Style and American Psychological Association citation formats in order to reach a broader audience of professional writers and scholars. However, working together while geographically separated can be challenging for the four full-time university students.
"At the end of each week, we hold a conference call that lasts about an hour discussing issues with the site," Solof said.
Many libraries and schools have linked to the site, including in states such as New York, Kansas and Indiana. The site includes coding for people interested in placing a link to WorksCited4U.com on their websites.
"Almost every day we get an e-mail from a school asking us if they can link up to us," Solof said.
The team recently launched a new website called Proofread4U.com, a paper-editing service, in order to capitalize on the high volume of traffic its other site generates and bring in additional revenue. The service costs between $4 and $6 per typed page, depending on the turnaround time and thoroughness of the editing. Each editor has a four-year degree from an accredited university and extensive editing experience, the website says.
"We pay the professional editors about $2-$4 a page. So we are making on average $2 a page," Solof said. "We expect to start bringing in volume of around 1,000-2,000 pages a month. We hope to make an additional $2,000-$4,000 a month in the near future with the proofreading website."
© 2008, Young Money Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
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