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A survey of British institutions reveals that few have taken concrete steps to stop the much-criticized misuse of research metrics in the evaluation of academics’ work. The results offer an early insight into global efforts to clamp down on such practices.
DORA calls for panels responsible for academic promotion and hiring to stop misusing metrics such as the journal impact factor — which measures the average number of citations accumulated by papers in a given journal over two years — as a way to assess individual researchers. It urges panels to assess the content of papers and quality of research instead.

The Department of Education is planning to introduce laws to prosecute “essay mill” companies who offer to write students’ assignments in exchange for money. The move is a response to mounting concern over the practice which allows students to circumvent their college’s plagiarism detection systems. The use of these services is not easily detected as software used by universities only detects where students have copied from previously published academic texts. He said the new guidelines would be developed in consultation with providers, students and other relevant parties, and would be informed by recent UK research and experience.

The open access movement has come out of the idea that publicly-funded research should be available to the public. There are thousands of open access journals but many of them are seen to lack the prestige that universities demand for researchers. Academics can’t afford to read their own work but they can’t afford not to publish in these prestigious journals if they want to advance their careers. Many academics have to seek other means for finding articles rather than pay the minimum US$30 that most publishers charge to access an article.

There have been calls for Welsh universities to be more consistent in dealing with students who plagiarise. New figures show between 2008 and 2011, 927 students from six Welsh universities copied work.

Popular web-based auction sites such as eBay could be contributing to the spiralling number of plagiarism cases occurring at British universities. Increasing numbers of students are turning to commercial sales sites to both buy and sell dissertations and essays on the web. Powerpoint presentations and slides have emerged as the newest form of work to attract buyers on the internet.