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A researcher accused of making false statements about his employment in China while working at universities in the US has been charged for illegally using $4 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to develop China's expertise in the areas of rheumatology and immunology. The FBI arrested another Cleveland Clinic researcher working on molecular medicine and a University of Arkansas scientist doing research for NASA. They were accused of committing fraud by concealing their participation in Chinese talent-recruitment programs while accepting Federal grants.

Many institutions in Australia provide training programmes for their Ph.D. students but these programmes vary in quality, content and reach. The temptation to judge a researcher’s performance for grant funding by the number of published research papers and the focus on the quantity over quality is very strong. They are not just driving bad behaviour for researchers but are also creating a market for criminals to enter scholarly publishing.

A foreign graduate’s research papers were published under the name of his supervisor at the University of Putrajaya. The Ministry of Education has opened an investigation on this matter, encouraging other students who have been “robbed” to lodge a complaint with the ministry.

The Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science, and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University conducted a study on the quality of South Africa’s research publications, which includes predatory publishing. 4,246 South African papers published in 48 journals were found to be predatory. Several studies suggest that some academics are falling into predatory publication traps due to the pressure to publish, get more grants and boost their academic reputation.

Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings. One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.” Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure. Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals. Hundreds of Canadian scientists were found to have published recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.

More Canadian institutions will face controversy over the influence of donors on programmes if they do not rethink their relationship with private funders, warn academics who have studied the relationship between donations and educational institutions. This is following a string of cases over the past decade that have led academics across the country to criticize postsecondary institutions that appear to be willing to share control over their research agenda with private donors.

The academic spectrum across several Pakistani universities has become infected with the deadly plague of plagiarism. Academic integrity seems to have melted in the heat of churning out research papers to receive more grants, promotions and other benefits.

In a case that has rocked the academic community in Taiwan and put many scientific research projects in jeopardy, 22 professors at some of the country's top universities – including the prestigious National Taiwan University – have been charged with using false receipts to claim reimbursements out of research funds.

A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

A former Texas Tech University researcher, who was convicted of mishandling harassment complaints and cheating the university out of its share of clinical-research money, was sentenced last week to two years in prison and a $15,000 fine.