This video is made by IIPE-UNESCO, and aims to demonstrate the power of open data in education How can educational agents promote integrity and transparency in the education sector? Open school data is a powerful way to integrate the entire educational community: they share with the public information about school funding, student and teacher numbers, school equipment, textbooks, and test scores.

This short video produced by UNESCO IIEP explores three questions: What is the Open Government project? What are the benefits of open government for education? What good practice in open government has been identified?

Technology, greed, a lack of clear rules and norms, hyper-competitiveness and a certain amount of corruption have resulted in confusion and anarchy in the world of scientific communication. Not too long ago, scientific publication was largely in the hands of university publishers and non-profit scientific societies, most of which were controlled by the academic community. The issues involved are complex – how to manage technology, accommodate the expansion of scientific production, rationalise peer review, break the monopoly of the multinationals and, of great importance, instil a sense of ethics and realistic expectations into the academic community itself.

Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure. Even within the halls of respectable academia, the difference between legitimate and fake publications and conferences is far blurrier than scholars would like to admit. Some canny operators have now realized that when standards are loose to begin with, there are healthy profits to be made in the grey areas of academe.

Have you heard of 'predatory' publishers or journals? Such publishers or journals charge authors for publishing articles without having been peer-reviewed. Their number is growing. A list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers and journals can be found at Scholarly Open Access

A developmental university must have well-crafted research ethical standards anchored in principles of democracy, social justice and human rights. Research ethical standards are important as they provide guidelines for researchers to ensure that specific values like integrity, transparency, respect, objectivity and accountability are strictly observed; they generate confidence in and support for research among both domestic and international research communities; and they help establish trust between researchers and research participants.

Ethics is not always dealing with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but may sometimes be a choice of a lesser of evils, a nuanced decision dealing with trade-offs or viewed as situational. How do we better equip students to better understand ethical dilemmas and how to approach them? EthicalSystems.org, collects and shares research on ethics which spans a wide variety of topics, including accounting, cheating and honesty, contextual influences, corporate culture, corporate governance, corruption, decision-making, leadership and teaching ethics, among others.

Most scientists and medical researchers behave ethically. However, in recent years, the number of high-profile scandals in which researchers have been exposed as having falsified their data raises the issue of how we should deal with research fraud. There is little scholarship on this subject that crosses disciplines and engages with the broader phenomenon of unethical behaviour within the domain of research. This is partly because disciplines tend to operate in silos and because universities, in which researchers are often employed, tend to minimise adverse publicity.

Academic fraud such as bribery, bogus universities and falsified research findings is hardly a new phenomenon but it seems to be escalating worldwide, prompting quality assurance professionals meeting last week in Washington, DC to grapple with how, if at all, they can help combat the problem. No consensus was reached, but a prevailing view emerged that the potential consequences, if left unchecked, are dire.

Since the end of the Cold War, a dramatic increase in global education has led to increased commercialization, as well as an increase in corruption. Corruption in higher education should not only be seen in terms of misuse of research funds, presentation and construction of fraudulent data, or inequitable admissions practices.