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When a doctoral student denounced the theft of her work, she was told that it was part of the game. One in five PhD students in the academic world is facing this practice. According to an online survey conducted among 1,800 PhD students and young doctors, 21% of respondents said they had seen someone else take credit for their work. Concerned about the impact on their future careers, many PhD students choose to remain silent on such abuse.

To comply with the legal context and the requirements of funding agencies, while following the European Commission's guideline of "as open as possible, as closed as necessary", this School aims to share 100% of the research data that can be shared, within the framework of European projects and the French National Research Agency (ANR). 

A professor in political economy at the world’s oldest university has more or less invited his students to copy. It is his way of speaking out against the impunity of certain of his colleagues accused of plagiarism. He announced “I will not be checking to see if you have copied your work as I cannot, in good conscience, ask you to respect rules that the University of Bologna allows it’s professors to violate.”

Copying is stealing. This anti-plagiarism adage is at the heart of a case which has shaken the small world of French medievalists for the last two years. Today the case has come back with a new demonstration of plagiarist behaviour which is forcing universities and scientific communities to be face up to their responsibilities. And more generally, raises the question of whether the university system as a whole has the ability to tackle this issue, over and above the case in question.

An investigation published by Nature, reveals that a scientific plagiarism has course among researchers too. Two researchers from South-western Medical Centre of the University of Texas, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, auscultated an American medical documentation base, Medline, where summaries of 17 million articles published in more than 5,000 reviews from some 80 countries are indexed. They screened it through an engine search, eTBLAST, which is able to locate the "similarities". While focusing on the most quoted 7 million articles, they located a little more than 70,000 cases of "high resemblance". That which, taking into account the limits of the software, makes them estimate the number of plagiarisms at more than 200,000, out of the 17 million referred articles.