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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.

The ministry of Higher education and research entrusted to the national Centre of scientific research (CNRS) a mission on scientific integrity. Scientific fraud is varied: biased manufacturing or forgery of results, biased interpretation or selection of data, alteration of curves or images, plagiarism, theft of ideas, financial profit-sharing's ... The increasing pressure which practices on the researchers (among which the career and the credits depend strictly on the quantity of articles and on produced results) tend to multiply the fraudulent practices.

An investigation published by Nature, reveals that a scientific plagiarism has course among researchers too. Two researchers from South-western Medical Centre of the University of Texas, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, auscultated an American medical documentation base, Medline, where summaries of 17 million articles published in more than 5,000 reviews from some 80 countries are indexed. They screened it through an engine search, eTBLAST, which is able to locate the "similarities". While focusing on the most quoted 7 million articles, they located a little more than 70,000 cases of "high resemblance". That which, taking into account the limits of the software, makes them estimate the number of plagiarisms at more than 200,000, out of the 17 million referred articles.

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.

Makerere University has established a new policy that provides for the sacking of lecturers over drunkenness, writes Francis Kagolo for The New Vision. The policy, which seeks to boost academic standards, also requires lecturers to teach for a minimum of 10 hours a week and provide evidence that they carry out research.

A new research shows the extent of nepotism in higher education. Overall, the country's higher institutions are 10 times more likely than other places of work to employ two or more members of the same family. This grip of family fiefdoms is blamed for a nationwide brain drain.

Polish university students are using Wikipedia and "crib sheet" websites as the main source for their master's thesis, a new survey reveals.