Plagiarism was, it is and it will be [unfortunately] always present in our life. We can not get rid of it, but we can fight against it by all means. It should be not tolerated at all, whatever the level is, not even in schools, high schools, colleges or universities. Forbidden!
Recently Europe faced several huge plagiarism scandals involving the former Minister of Defense in Germany, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and the former President of Hungary, Pal Schmitt. One compiled his Ph.D. thesis based on existing documents, while the other copied some work, word by word using some work of some bulgarian and german scientist. Unfortunately, in both cases they vehemently denied the allegations, but in both cases due to the pressure of the media and the scientific community some scientific committees decided about the plagiarism and their scientific title of Ph.D. for zu Guttenberg and dr. for Pal Schmitt was redrawn. In both cases as they occupied high positions in the state they had to resign immediately. So you can imagine, if plagiarism is spotted at such a high level, how much plagiarism is not detected at lower levels?!
Recently a similar case was drawn to the attention of the romanian public once Ioan Mang, a so-called "university professor" from University of Oradea was sworn as head of the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport. It was proved that he and his co-authors copied several papers of japanese, taiwanese, israeli, etc. researchers. It is unbelievable. Such a cheater now is responsible for the education in Romania. Can you imagine?
Recently a committee was asked to decide about the plagiarism fact and hopefully, this committee from the Romanian Academy of Science will decide impartially based only on scientific facts. However, analyzing more in details this obscure character, we can spot some really important issues which are not really singularities in the romanian scientific society.
A complete generation of so-called scientists/faculty members got high academical positions in Romania like full professor, associate professor, etc. positions - not based on real scientific quality, but rather on fake scientific work, textbooks written without any real scientific value and other "works" published rather in local conferences and local journals without any scientific impact. These conferences, symposiums and journals are written mainly in Romanian and it is only an artificially created "scientific community" in order to have some possibilities to publish. These mediums are not indexed by Thomson Reuters (former ISI), DBLP, SCOPUS, IEEE Explore, MathSciNet, etc., however, all these publications will "generate" new entries in their curriculum vitae. There is another issue how those reviews in those journals are done, but I think a complete blog entry can be consecrated to this aspect.
Indeed, many romanian scientists can not attend conferences abroad due to precarious financial situations of their institutes, but this could not be an excuse to generate garbage or scientifically useless/poor work. However, this less valuable work (with probably many plagiarisms) allowed many researchers to occupy high positions in universities and research centers and once they were hired nobody can fire them anymore, and the romanian society has to support them financially, and you can imagine what kind of science is spread by many of them .... It is quite funny, the current law of education accepted in 2011 describes some standards to hire university professors and associate professors which are that high (a rather good thing I would say) that 90% of the current occupants of these positions would not even be accepted to apply. Of course this is not applied to all scientists and faculty members, but unfortunately it can apply to many.
P.S. I am wondering how such an obscure character like Ioan Mang got a university positions with only 2 papers indexed in dblp and 5 papers in scopus. This means all the other work what he published (not considering all those papers which he copied using CTRL-C, CTRL-V operations from others because it would be not appropriate to do so) are not really high quality papers ... How such a "professor" can stand as role model for his students? How such a "professor" can manage the Ministry of Education?
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