Oh, no!
Some University of Bath graduates are accusing University Technology Mara of intellectual property theft after discovering that their MBA thesis papers were uploaded on UiTM’s Institutional Repository (IR).
15 students from the 1994 Bath Executive Masters of Business Administration (MBA) – Malaysia Institute of Management (MIM) programme claimed that their thesis were used without their consent.
What’s worse is that there is a UiTM logo and copyright on a paper that doesn’t belong to the university. The UiTM logo is displayed on the front page, giving the impression that the students collaborated with UiTM on the paper, which wasn’t the case at all.
The students looked into the incident, and one of them have since e-mailed UiTM regarding the thesis papers. UiTM then replied to inform him that his thesis paper had been taken down. However, only one of the students’ papers was removed, while the rest still remain in the IR.
According to UiTM IR’s website, it is clearly stated that it is a “centre of digital collections, and acts as an open-access repository that collects, preserves and disseminates scholarly output by university members at UiTM (journal articles, book chapters, books, conference papers, theses, working papers, technical reports, data and other types of research publications as well as unpublished manuscripts and papers)”.
Meanwhile, both MIM and UiTM are currently investigating the matter.
[Source]