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According to Slovak media the Speaker of the Slovakian Parliament has been accused of having copied his JuDR doctoral thesis in law from five other sources. The politician put his thesis in the university library under embargo, when the accusations first arose. Comenius University announced that a doctoral dissertation with the same title and same number of pages was missing in its university archive and that an enquiry has been launched.

One of Croatia’s top judges is hitting back at the country’s national research ethics panel after having been found guilty of plagiarism. The president of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia, announced last week that he has filed criminal complaints against all five members of the Committee on Ethics in Science and Higher Education (CESHE), after it concluded that his 2013 doctoral thesis about children’s rights in EU and Croatian law contained repeated instances of “incomplete and opaque citations” of other people’s work.

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.”

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.

Universities increase measures to combat academic fraud as websites offer to do work. A proliferation of online services for third-level students offering “pay as you go” essays has prompted universities to review their policies against plagiarism. DCU is one of a number of institutions that are altering their methods of assessment, in tandem with the rollout of “cut-and-paste” detection software, to combat the threat of academic fraud.

Weeks after Germany's defense minister was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal, three German universities say they are investigating similar complaints about the academic work of three figures from the country's political sphere.

The Italian cabinet has ordered the roll-out of a national accreditation scheme for academics to stamp out nepotism. Under the new scheme, commissions of five senior academics appointed in each university will accredit applicants for associate or full professorships on the basis of the quality and quantity of their academic output.