Diverse links

Here are some links that need documenting:

• Journal Accepts Paper Reading “Get Me Off Your F[...] Mailing List”
  Not only was the paper plagiarized and still had the names of the original authors, it should have been abundantly clear that this was not an academic paper worthy of publication. That did not stop the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (already listed on Jeffrey Beale's list of predatory publishers) from accepting this paper found "excellent" by the peer reviewers that was to be published soon after receipt of the handling fee of $ 150...
• Spears: How my fake science paper earned me a shot at an editor's job
  Same song, second verse. Who cares who you are or if you are a plagiarist, just send the review as soon as possible, okay? And would you like to be an editor?
• A case of plagiarism by a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, Iran is widely discussed.  
• In Spain, a politician was found to have plagiarized in his dissertation ( [Levante EMV 1 - 2 ] - [Valencia Plaza])  as well as a professor [abc.es].
• A high-ranking Swiss public official in the Bundesamt für Kultur, now retired, pretended to have a doctorate for over 30 years. The Tagesanzeiger wonders if, since he was the person deciding which institutions would get money, no one cared.
• Back in October there was a bit of kerfluffle at the LMU in Munich, Germany, about an applicant for a professorship said to have plagiarized his application lecture. 
• Retraction Watch found this gem of a journal: "Article which was reviewed & approved by EB member with lowest plagiarism will only be allow to published." Seems rather similar to a Springer journal recently encountered: "The Protein Journal will reject without consideration any submission that has a similarity score of 45% or more."
• And finally, another highlight from Retraction Watch about a professor plagiarizing from his grad students in Canada. The professor defends his actions by publicly insulting the grad student.

There will be more, I'm afraid, to come. 

Plagiarism problems in new Iranian president's dissertation?

Foreign Policy reports that Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani completed his doctoral work at the Scottish Glasgow Caledonian University in 1999. A Farsi-language web site has published (apparently, I don't read Farsi, but there are text passages compared in English on the site) a documentation of similarities between his abstract and other books. Since doctoral theses are not published in the UK, the thesis is not available for general reading.

An update notes that:

Glasgow Caledonian University Director of Communications Charles McGehee writes, "Our University library has just confirmed that  Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence is referenced in the main body of the Dr Rouhani's thesis and in the bibliography."
He also notes, "we have formally requested permission from the author to digitise the thesis and submit it to the British Library so that it may be accessible to the wider public."

The article in Foreign Policy details other problems with the academic biography of Rowhani.

Perhaps the EU should consider insisting on all dissertations being published digitally?

Iranian Minister of the Interior caught without titles

Spiegel Online is reporting that the Minister of the Interior of Iran, Ali Kordan, doesn't have either am Iranian Bachelor's or a Master's degree, as he had claimed, and that the honorary doctorate that he supposedly was granted from Oxford University is a fake. The mistakes in spelling on the document are apparently a dead give-away, and Oxford has no record of having given him a degree. A spokesman for Oxford noted that honorary doctorates are awarded to scientists and scholars, not politicians.

The Iranian parliament was not amused, and has fired Kordan. The prime minister, Mahmud Ahmadinedschad, said he didn't care about any pieces of paper, he was only interested in results. Of course, he now has a problem. Since he himself fired nine ministers over the course of the past three years because of differences of opinion, and Kordan is now the tenth minister to leave his position, the constitution of Iran insists that Ahmadinedschad now ask parliament for a vote of confidence.