News

Trouble With the Board

The Ottawa Citizen ran a lead, masthead editorial over the weekend on the Conference Board of Canada plagiarism story.  The paper notes that "these have been difficult days for the Conference Board" and points out:

It is to president Anne Golden's credit that the board did recall the reports. But she has yet to make a complete accounting for why the mistakes happened in the first place. Until then, the Conference Board's brand – and research – will be vulnerable to attack. If the plagiarism was the result of laziness or incompetence, that would be worrying. But it would be far less worrying than the other possibility – that the Conference Board was influenced by the very active entertainment-industry lobby, which has a strong interest in portraying copyright infringement as harmful and pervasive.

The editorial concludes by stating that "the Conference Board says it is investigating what happened with this project. The many people who have come to depend on the Conference Board's thoughtful policy work are due an explanation."

One Comment

  1. Let’s be serious
    The Conference Board relies heavily on contract research (which it carefully refers to as custom research) and consulting (which it carefully refers to as counseling)services to generate over $35 million in yearly revenues and $1.2 million in profits (which it carefully refers to as excess of revenues over expenses. To believe that the organization is not influenced by research funders is simply naive. It is the same as beleiving that “excess of revenues over expenses” is not profit.