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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.

Student researchers found guilty of plagiarism may lose their registration and teachers could lose their jobs as the HRD ministry approved new regulations on plagiarism drafted by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in New Delhi. In March this year, the UGC had approved the regulations prescribing graded punishment for plagiarism. In case the similarities are between 40% and 60%, students will be banned from submitting a revised paper for one year. A student's registration for a programme will be cancelled if the similarities are above 60%

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.

The excitement that marks the beginning of the academic year in the Algerian higher education sector, belies a crisis of credibility in the wake of several recent incidents of cheating. Last October, teachers in the faculty of economics at the University of Algiers disclosed the names of students accused of cheating in a doctoral entrance examination, but thus far no action against the students has been reported in the media. In a city east of Algeria two masters examinations were cancelled in October after model answers were leaked, while in the west, four doctoral projects in the faculty of arts and literature were nullified following complaints of academic dishonesty.

The ministry of higher education and scientific research has sent a written notice to all university presidents, criticising them for non-compliance with a July 2016 ministerial decree which criminalised plagiarism, and urging them to deal with all irregularities in accordance with the rules. The instruction raises the possibility of past abuses which may have been overlooked by vice-chancellors, including the inappropriate appointment of individuals to examinations and theses adjudication boards. The letter constitutes an unprecedented move against a scourge that academics suggest is becoming “common practice” in universities.

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.