More than 800 scientists have signed a petition started two weeks ago campaigning for an overhaul of research ethics and the assessment process for researchers in Serbia, amid systematic and widely-tolerated academic misconduct. An open letter has also been sent to the science and education ministry.
The letter details a damning situation of research and publication misconduct, including widespread plagiarism, self-plagiarism and duplication of papers; the formation of ‘citation cartels’ where friends’ names are added as co-authors on papers; and artificially upping the impact factor of predatory journals that publish low quality work by citing unrelated research from the same journals.
Mićo Tatalović is a news editor at Research Professional News. He has previously worked as a science news editor at Nature, New Scientist, and SciDev.Net. In 2018, he completed the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, where he researched the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in science journalism. He is also immediate former chairman of the Association of British Science Writers, and a board member of the European Federation for Science Journalism.
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