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Academics and students around the world at this very second are being subjected to infringements of their professional and human rights, and most of these violations are going unnoticed. Violations of this kind are not limited to countries with poor human rights records. On the contrary, in the post 9/11 world even the most transparent democracies are showing signs that are a cause for concern. Many institutions and academics in the West are subject to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control.

A German professor has won a precedent-setting case to prevent European Union publishers from using university-collated compendiums of out-of-copyright materials to produce their own commercial collections of works. A ruling from the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said that publishers could be blocked from selling these books, if they "transfer a substantial part" of the original source to their own publication.

A leaked e-mail from Manchester Metropolitan University shows how university staff are being urged to increase the number of top degree grades to keep pace with competing universities. The leaking of the e-mail provides further evidence of the concern among academics over the pressure to manipulate degree awards to improve the public image of universities and to make them more attractive to applicants. The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

The plagiarism is more and more spread in universities. In cause, Internet. To overcome this phenomenon, the catholic university of Louvain makes sensitive and tests a detector software of plagiarism. Every work or report is scanned by the software. Green light, the work is "sane". Red light, similarities with accessible documents on the Web or in the works of other students exist and the teacher will have to establish the scale of the plagiarism.

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.

The ministry of Higher education and research entrusted to the national Centre of scientific research (CNRS) a mission on scientific integrity. Scientific fraud is varied: biased manufacturing or forgery of results, biased interpretation or selection of data, alteration of curves or images, plagiarism, theft of ideas, financial profit-sharing's ... The increasing pressure which practices on the researchers (among which the career and the credits depend strictly on the quantity of articles and on produced results) tend to multiply the fraudulent practices.

For the very first time in Guinea, professors were suspended by their functions for facts of corruption and the students were condemned to pay a fine or to a prison sentence for fraud in the examinations. During his taking of office, Mr Souaré, Minister of the Higher education and the scientific research - who arises from the labor union of the teachers and which fought in the past against the corruption - had indicated that it would make of the fight against the fraud and the corruption its first priority.

Three former professors at Oral Roberts University have sued the evangelical institution in Tulsa (Okla) filing a petition in state court that accuses the university's president of using university resources to back a local mayoral candidate and to pay for an extravagant lifestyle for his family. The university released a statement denying the allegations.

According to the report of the general inspection of the administration of the national education and the research (IGAENR), the evaluation of the students at the university is not good. Actually, the fragmentation of the evaluations (due to the transition to the half yearly of the studies connected to the passage in the LMD) and the complexity of rules, return the illegible system for the students. It also entails disparities of treatment; thus universities develop their own rules of evaluation: the faculties with big workforce opt for the multiple choice question paper, faster and easy to organize. Besides, the cheating is another factor that undermine the credibility of the diplomas: according to the questioned students, between 25 and 50 % of the students resort to it.