iThenticate Blog

In Maine, Republican Governor Paul LePage has announced that he is seeking to withhold more than $400,000 owed to the Alexander Group, a consulting firm that was promised $925,000 to draft an evaluation of the Maine welfare system.

 According to Kai Kupferschmidt at Science, the plagiarism saga of former German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan has reached a conclusion as Schavan is giving up her legal bid to keep her Ph.D.

Schavan found herself in the center of controversy in late 2012 when an anonymous blogger and part of the Vroniplag Wiki posted an accusation that she had plagiarized portions of her dissertation, written in 1980. Schavan was then a key member of Angela Merkel’s cabinet and a high-ranking figure in German politics.

According to Yomiuri Shimbun at The Japan News, Weseda University’s Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering has begun an investigation into all of the doctoral theses that have been written for it to determine if any had been plagiarized or suffered from other ethical lapses.

The investigation comes after the controversy surrounding Haruko Obokata, who earned her doctorate at Wesada University and then went on to work at the RIKEN institute, where she claims to have discovered anew way to create stem cells. However, her work has come under fire as accusations of plagiarism and difficulties replicating her results have raised questions about the research.

According to a recent report in the Times Higher Education, prominent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been accused of plagiarism in his most recent book, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?

Dr. Zaid Mahmood, a professor at Punjab University’s (PU) Institute of Chemistry, which is located in Pakistan, has been forced to retired after a ruling from the PU Syndicate, which found that Mahmood had plagiarized in earlier works.

The case began in 2011 when another professor atthe Institute ofChemistry filed a complaint against Dr. Mahood saying that he had plagiarized in several research articles. An inquiry committee was formed and it compared Dr. Mahmood’s work to its original sources and found that most of the material was plagiarized.

Dr. Haruko Obokata recently became the talk of the stem cell research community. The lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature claimed that mouse stem cells could be created by soaking blood cells in a weak acid.  If those results could be replicated and reproduced in humans, it would pave the way for new treatments for a variety of ailments.

Last month, Richard Van Noorden at Nature reported that two major publishers were removing some 120 papers from their subscription services after it was revealed that the papers were computer-generated.

The Internet has opened up countless new avenues of both creative and scientific collaboration. It is now possible for two people to work together to create something new without either of them having to see or even be aware of the other person. Best of all, this can be done with permission and within the bounds of both law and ethics.

Those who follow international plagiarism news have likely become familiar with the work of Dissernet, a group of citizen activists in Russia who, following the pattern of similar groups in Germany, have been working to analyze dissertations by politicians and report on any instances of suspected plagiarism.