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A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

Popular web-based auction sites such as eBay could be contributing to the spiralling number of plagiarism cases occurring at British universities. Increasing numbers of students are turning to commercial sales sites to both buy and sell dissertations and essays on the web. Powerpoint presentations and slides have emerged as the newest form of work to attract buyers on the internet.

This was the second annual Strategic Leaders Global Summit sponsored by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). Last year's meeting in Banff in Canada resulted in the "Banff Principles" to broadly guide international collaboration in graduate education; this year's summit focused on "best practices" specific to promoting scholarly integrity. Leaders in higher education agreed on issues and actions that have to lead to strengthen scholarly integrity because of the growing globalization of graduate education and research, and discussed on "best practices" to promote scholarly integrity.

The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Universities Australia have launched a revision version of a Code for Responsible Research. The purpose of the Code is to guide institutions and researchers in responsible research practices. It embraces topics such as managing data and materials; publication and dissemination of findings; attribution; peer review processes and conflict of interest.

In their race to lure more postgraduate students, some universities are stopping just short of offering students a free semester to Jamaica where they can sip cocktails and finish up their research thesis. Postgraduate students are cash cows because they bring with them high government subsidies, more than for undergraduates.

A Chinese Professor has been fired by his university and disqualified from China's Recruitment Program of Global Experts for copying his resume and academic articles from three other academics with the same name. The 39 year-old professor with the Beijing University of Chemical Technology has admitted falsifying his educational background, work experience and published articles by copying the details from overseas professors.

A man assumed the academic identity of a Yale University assistant professor who has the same name as him for several months. The person joined Beijing University of Chemical Technology as a professor in November. His resume listed seven articles published by top English-language academic journals, but the articles were the work of an assistant professor at Yale University.

Students and academics from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong researching the working conditions of student interns at factories in China have said that an officially agreed investigation into working conditions at Foxconn factories, which produce Apple iPads, did not provide a "full picture" of the extent of abuse of the internship system.

Once comprehensively surveyed, the magnitude and reach of fraud is becoming clear. For example, research suggests that the majority of applications from a number of large student-sending countries are either significantly embellished or outright fraudulent. As a result, tens of thousands of international students, having passed through visa and admissions systems, are enrolled all over the world based on school transcripts, financial support statements, recommendation letters or test scores that are untrue.

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.