News from around the world

Again, just a few links to interesting topics from around the world.

• There has been a case of a Belgian sociologist at the KU Leuven festering since 2017, according to Google Translate's version of a Dutch Wikipedia article. He has apparently re-published papers of other researchers and published work of co-workers that was not yet published. According to an article in De Standaard from 23 April 2019, he resigned his position as head of the "Center for Political Science" in 2018, but remains a full professor at the university.
• The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) has finally investigated cases of academic misconduct, mostly plagiarism, in 27 master't theses from universities of applied sciences, according to YLE, the Finnish broadcasting body. Most of them contained clear plagiarism. Dr. Erja Moore (author of the blog "Plagiointitutkija" in Finnish) chose the theses more or less at random from the open access thesis repository, investigated them, prepared documentation, and informed the universities in question of the problems. TENK Secretary General Sanna Kaisa Spoof has stated that the situation is serious and worrying. Dr. Moore will be presenting her results at the ENAI (European Network for Academic Integrity) "Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond" Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, June 19-21, 2019.
• VroniPlag Wiki just published a documentation (in German) of text parallels found in the doctoral dissertation of the current German Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Franziska Giffey. The press has been reporting on this since they "discovered" the work-in-progress in February 2019.