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In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.

Although there has been an enormous expansion in higher education in India over the past 30 years there is still a huge problem around quality. In 2013 the Indian government launched a new higher education improvement programme. Australian universities can help by: training staff, rooting out corruption, sharing knowledge on access, and establishing research partnerships.

Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

In order to improve the quality of published research and to crack down on so-called ‘predatory’ academic publishers – who charge fees to authors but fail to provide adequate quality control, or make misleading claims about their quality – India’s University Grants Commission (UGC) has published lists of approved journals for publishing research papers. The UGC, a statutory body that oversees university education in India, has now linked academic promotions and recruitment to its system of Academic Performance Indicators which will only recognise papers published in journals that are on the approved lists.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has released the Draft UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2017. As the name suggests, the aim of the draft is to create academic awareness about responsible conduct of research and prevention of misconduct including plagiarism in academic writing. The draft also seeks to establish institutional mechanism for promotion of academic integrity and develop systems to detect and prevent plagiarism.

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.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) implemented new regulations in order to prevent plagiarism and academic misconduct by students. They required every institution to establish a mechanism to enhance awareness about responsible conduct of research and academic activities, promotion of academic integrity and deterrence from plagiarism. The ministry of human resource development told a meeting of vice-chancellors that plagiarism software would be provided free to all institutions. However, similarity-detection is only possible if the original material is available online. And plagiarism is not just about text similarity, but also recycling of copied figures, tables, and photographs.