Keep academia clean

Zhejiang University announced at the weekend it would fire an associate professor who plagiarized research papers published by several overseas magazines. Another associate professor has been dismissed from his post as head of a research group for his involvement in the scandal. The university has also announced that it will not renew the contract of a Chinese Academy of Sciences academic as president of its pharmacy school after his name also appeared in the dishonest papers.

The Ministry of Education convened a seminar on Sunday to discuss how to crack down on the unethical academic behavior rampant in recent years that has seriously tarnished the reputation of institutions of higher learning.

How an associate professor could be so audacious as to plagiarize research findings of his former tutor is beyond comprehension. What's more, he even used the same figures for different experiments and submitted the same papers to different overseas magazines for publication after making only minor changes.