April 21, 2011

Turkish testing official embroiled in new academic scandal

A top educational official already embroiled in a controversy over an alleged cheating scandal on a national exam has been accused of academic plagiarism.
According to the new claims, Professor Ali Demir, the chairman of Turkey’s Student Selection and Placement Center, or ÖSYM, plagiarized in an article he wrote while working as a lecturer at Loughborough University in 1990. He was reportedly saved from being fired through the intervention of influential scholars at the university.
Demir worked at Loughborough University as a lecturer after completing his doctoral degree at the school. During this period, he penned a nine-part series of articles for a Turkish magazine called “Teknik ve Tekstil” (Technology and Textile). The series appeared to be entirely the work of Demir, but the new allegations say it was instead nearly a word-for-word translation of work by a German writer named Peter Latzke.
Latzke was only mentioned by Demir in a brief acknowledgement in the first part of the series.
The claim of plagiarism was first made by Professor Mike Denton of Leeds University, who brought his allegations to the attention of the Loughborough University administration. They were communicated to Professor Gordon Wray, the head of the school’s textile department, who immediately proceeded to launch an investigation into the matter.
Following a long series of discussions and meetings, Wray accepted as a compromise a written apology from Demir, to be published in the magazine.
“Associate Professor Demir has just obtained written permission for this work from [European textile journal] Melliand Textilberichte. Associate Professor Demir apologizes to both Mr. P.M. Latzke as well as to Melliand Textilberichte for not having obtained written permission prior to the publishing of the series,” said the explanation at the beginning of the ninth and last part in the series.
Demir has recently come into the spotlight in Turkey for his alleged role in a cheating scandal that has erupted around the university entrance exam that took place March 27. ISTANBUL - Radikal

No comments:

Random Posts


  • Editorial: It is not just the work - It is also the words

    Ramaswamy Murali Indian J Crit Care Med 2007;11:169-72 >>>While one can sympathize with the handicaps in language faced by the Turkish physicists it is important to remember that it is the responsibility of the scientist to meet ethical standards established by the journals or societies in ... READ MORE>>

  • Editorial note: The issue of plagiarism

    Gen Relativ GravitDOI 10.1007/s10714-007-0531-2EDITORIALEditorial note: The issue of plagiarismGeorge F. R. Ellis · Hermann Nicolai© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Readers of this Journal may be aware that the admistrators of the internet archive www.arXiv.org have withdrawn a series of pa... READ MORE>>

  • Plagiarism: text-matching program offers an answer - Correspondance: NATURE

    John Bechhoefer1The removal of almost 70 papers from the arXiv server on suspicion of plagiarism is dismaying (Nature 449, 8; doi:10.1038/449008b 2007). But, in a similar way to that currently being tested by the cooperative group of publishers CrossRef ('Academic accused of living on borrowed lines... READ MORE>>

  • Plagiarism? No, we're just borrowing better English - Correspondance: NATURE

    Ihsan Yilmaz1 The accusations made by arXiv that my colleagues and I have plagiarized the works of others, reported in your News story 'Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism' (Nature 449, 8; doi:10.1038/449008b 2007) are upsetting and unfair. It's inappropriate to single out my colleague... READ MORE>>

  • Academic Dishonesty and Graduate Students

    CEW Brownbag Discussion • Research on academic dishonesty among graduate students is comparatively limited. Most studies of academic dishonesty in higher education have tended to focus on undergraduates or on students as a whole, without distinguishing between graduate and undergraduate students. As... READ MORE>>

  • A Case of Plagiarism in the Physics Preprint Server arXiv.

    Alex Bienkowski One of the more interesting developments in web-based scientific publishing has been the growth of arXiv, a “preprint” server originally launched by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos and now hosted at Cornell. The system was first called xxx, and the domain was high-energy physics. Later... READ MORE>>

  • Nearly there!

    Chris Leonard Plagiarism & PMC Physics A There has been a lot of recent publicity on the Turkish plagiarism sandal which has affected arXiv and several high-profile physics journals recently. This has been an 'elephant in the room' of science publishing for some years now. Skillfully manipulated... READ MORE>>

.

.
.

Popular Posts