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A German finance expert has warned that the country’s federal states could be entering a “dangerous race to the bottom” regarding legislation on transparency in cooperation between industry and higher education. He believes that cooperation agreements should be publicly accessible in order to guarantee academic freedom. The professor of finance and political economy at Aalen University, contested a contract between the University of Mainz and the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, the country’s largest pharmaceutical company that also engages in research.

Have you heard of 'predatory' publishers or journals? Such publishers or journals charge authors for publishing articles without having been peer-reviewed. Their number is growing. A list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers and journals can be found at Scholarly Open Access

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.”

To ensure the healthy development of academia, there has to be fundamental changes made to China’s academic incentive system with a move away from the current method of judging researchers through the number of publications they have in ranked journals. This method leads some to chase after numbers while ignoring academic integrity. With deep roots in Chinese cultural traditions and a fertile soil that nourishes corruption, China’s battle against research misconduct is doomed to be arduous.

A developmental university must have well-crafted research ethical standards anchored in principles of democracy, social justice and human rights. Research ethical standards are important as they provide guidelines for researchers to ensure that specific values like integrity, transparency, respect, objectivity and accountability are strictly observed; they generate confidence in and support for research among both domestic and international research communities; and they help establish trust between researchers and research participants.

Australian universities have been hyperactive in tying up collaborations and research cooperation deals with universities and other organisations in China, including Chinese state-backed companies. But in the wake of a major political scandal in Australia involving Chinese donors who have also funded local institutions, universities have been advised to be alert about undue influence by donor organisations on research, including pressure to produce research for Chinese propaganda purposes.

Students have “no understanding” of what plagiarism is and why they must avoid it, according to new research. An education research fellow at the University of Otago, finds that universities might need to consider their plagiarism policies and how they might “influence or confuse students in counterproductive ways”. The qualitative study, published in the journal Higher Education, found that although “aware of plagiarism as a concept” and believing that those who “intentionally cheat are cheating everybody”, students were ignorant of the potential implications of unintentional plagiarism.

Most scientists and medical researchers behave ethically. However, in recent years, the number of high-profile scandals in which researchers have been exposed as having falsified their data raises the issue of how we should deal with research fraud. There is little scholarship on this subject that crosses disciplines and engages with the broader phenomenon of unethical behaviour within the domain of research. This is partly because disciplines tend to operate in silos and because universities, in which researchers are often employed, tend to minimise adverse publicity.

Some 34 percent of academic theses in Turkey have high plagiarism rates, according to a report by the Education Policy Research and Application Center (BEPAM) of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. In its study on the “quality of academic writing,” BEPAM examined 600 theses in total, including 470 master’s theses and 130 doctoral theses written between 2007 and 2016. The study revealed “heavy plagiarism” in 34 percent of the theses. The rate was 46 percent in private universities and 31 percent in public universities.