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A Madrid university has suspended an official over a fake degree scandal. The King Juan Carlos University suspended the director of the school's Public Law Institute. The department allegedly awarded master's degrees to two Popular Party (PP) politicians without them completing the work. However the former said last week the university had pressured him to lie about the qualifications. The university's president denies pressuring the director. He also announced on Friday an internal probe into all the university's departments.

Sexual misconduct by university staff is rife on campuses, with more than four in 10 students reporting that they have suffered unwelcome advances and assault, including sexualised comments, inappropriate touching and rape, research shows. The study, raises particular concern over the finding that the vast majority of perpetrators are academic staff, who have “power over students’ academic success, well-being and career” prospects. More than 60% of respondents said the perpetrator was a man.

KU Leuven is currently investigating some 20 papers from the period 1999 to 2013 that would contain fraudulent images. Two papers have recently been withdrawn, one has been officially corrected. The investigation of the Committee for Academic Integrity is in a final phase. The articles that are under discussion come from the biomedical sciences. Three Leuven professors are a co-author of several indicated papers. In many cases, this was done in collaboration with colleagues from foreign institutions.

The public has been raging in social networks throughout the weekend over the court ruling lifting a post-suspension from the head of a Kyiv-based medical university. Such cases are not uncommon in Ukraine when courts take the side of rectors, deans and professors who were not just involved in scandals and fights with government officials, but were caught red-handed in blatant corruption acts. Severe punishment for such an offense, including between five and ten years of imprisonment, does not seem to discourage bribe-takers, who all too often let off with no consequences.

Sexual harassment in universities is to be investigated by the National Union of Students, which is conducting the UK’s first survey of staff sexual misconduct in higher education. Students will be asked whether they have experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct by staff and about their experience of reporting this behaviour to their institution. The research project is being carried out by the NUS women’s campaign. Researchers will consider professional boundaries and examine what types of behaviour students are comfortable dealing with from higher education staff.

On September 24, 2017 the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported on an investigation into self-plagiarism (zelfplagiaat) that was conducted by a Nijmengen research group. The sociologist of science and his PhD student analysed 922 publications by Dutch researchers from recent years. In economics, 14 % of the papers contained text from previous publications of the author(s), in psychology the figure was 5 %. They even found a duplicate article republished with just one small change, and two highly similar articles by the same author in the same issue of a journal. They also found that authors who publish more papers are more likely to reuse text.

The Swedish organization in charge of reviewing research has judged that scandal-hit surgeon was guilty of scientific misconduct for misleadingly describing synthetic trachea operations as successful in a series of research articles. In 2014, four doctors at Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital reported him to the then president of the Karolinska Institute (KI) for allegedly distorting the facts about his operations with artificial tracheas when presenting them in scientific journals. The articles were subsequently reviewed in 2015 by Uppsala University surgical sciences professor, who concluded that Macchiarini was guilty of research misconduct, but KI's overall assessment was to clear him and the co-authors.