Turkish Education Minister under Plagiarism Charges

The Nature blog reports that the new Turkish Minister of Education, Ömer Dinçer, lost his title of professor in 2005 on the basis of plagiarism in a textbook published in his name. Turkish Council of Higher Education took back his professorship title, and Dinçer lost his legal appeals case.

But on July 8, 2011, the Turkish Council of Higher Education cleared him, and on July 13 he was appointed Minister of Education. Nature spoke with the council, which confirmed that they had withdrawn the charge of plagiarism, but refused to elaborate.

Since this is a publicly available textbook, I would hope that Turkish academics can quickly set up a wiki and document the extent of the alleged plagiarism, in order to let the public judge for themselves how extensive the copying is.