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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.”

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.

The Office of the Higher Education Commission (Ohec) has warned universities they are responsible for placing more emphasis on the quality of teaching, especially at the graduate level, after two cases of alleged thesis plagiarism at Silpakorn University were unveiled last month. Ohec oversees higher education institutes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Its secretary-general says the office is concerned over the allegations.

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.