Things leftover in tabs from 2016

Happy New Year!

I seem to have collected quite a number of interesting stories that are hanging around in my browser tabs. Let me just document some of them here.

• Serays Maouche reports in December 2016 in Mediapart in France about a plagiarism case that involves a person who is professor at the École Centrale Paris and a director at the Atomic Energy Commission. It involves plagiarism in a number of texts, among them a biography of Einstein. The institutions involved have nothing to say on the matters. Ms. Maouche closes with the question "Comment sanctionner des étudiants pour plagiat, si on accepte cette fraude académique pour des directeurs et des académiciens ?" (How can we sanction students for plagiarim when this academic misconduct is accepted by the administrations and academics?)
• It was reported be the Guardian in November that the results of one portion of the ACT exam, one used by US-American universities to determine admission for foreign students, has been invalidated for Asia-Pacific students. No details were available. 
• In Spain, el diario reported on November 21 and  November 23 about a plagiarism case involving the rector of a Spanish university. The Google translate version is not very clear, so I don't want to try and summarize it here, just give the links. 
• In October the Chinese Global Times wrote about a report in the "Southern Weekly" about Chinese scientists and medical practioners paying journals to publish ghostwritten articles so that they can obtain promotions. Springer has since retracted 64 publications and BioMed Central 43 for faking peer reviews. 
• Radio Free Asia reported on September 21, 2016 that students in Laos had to retake college entrance exams after more than 100 students obtained a perfect score on the social sciences part of the exam. Students are angry, as they will again have to incur traveling expenses in order to retake the exam.
• Donald McCabe, a prolific researcher from Rutgers Business School who focused on determining how prevalent academic misconduct is amongst pupils and students worldwide and on the use of academic honor codes to prevent misconduct, passed away at age 72 on Sept. 17, 2016. I was lucky to get to meet Don in 2012 when he gave a talk at our university and we drove together down to Bielefeld for a conference. He will be sorely missed.
• The Moscow Times reported on September 8, 2016 that Russian education officials  "have reportedly developed draft legislation that would make it possible to revoke a person's academic doctorate only after a copyright ruling by a court has come into effect. " Although copyright and plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct have little to do with each other, this is apparently in response to the documentation work of Dissernet, who have documented plagiarism in hundreds of dissertations, among them many submitted by politicians to Russian universities. 
• There was a flurry of publications about paper mills and the problem of contract cheating, that is, students paying someone else to do their work for them. In the UK the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education published a report on contract cheating in August. The chief operations officer at an essay mill then wrote a defense of his industry for the Times Higher Education which sparked quite a debate. Tricia Bertram Gallant, also writing in the THE, called on universities to fight contract cheating by openly discussing the topic with students. October 19 was declared the "International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating" and a number of institutions worldwide participated. 
• The Age reported in October about an inside job at the University of Melbourne in Australia where grades on a manually graded exam was changed after grading with a red pen by someone who had access to the exam papers. The university was unable to determine who was responsible for the change.
• Joanna Williams reported in June in the Times Higer Education about a survey on research misconduct in the UK.
• In July 2016 the USA issued a patent (US9389852) to Indian researchers on a method for determining "plagiarism" in program code from Design Patterns. That Design Patterns were explicitly meant to be copied appears to have escaped the Patent Office. 
• The blog iPensatori analyzed how Google Scholar gets filled up with junk.
• The Office of Research Integrity has put up some infographics on their site about research integrity. They also have a guide on avoiding self-plagiarism.
• And while I am on the subject, the 5th World Conference on Research Integrity will be held from May 28-31, 2017, in Amsterdam (I am on the program committee). The conference proceedings from the previous conference is available here. There will also be the 3rd International Conference Plagiarism In Europe and Beyond from May 24-25 in Brno, Czech Republic.  And no, there are no direct flights Brno-Amsterdam.
• On March 18, 2016 the German DFG announced sanctions against an unnamed researcher who will be barred from applying for financing for three years.