International Colloquium

Research and action

on scientific fraud and plagiarism

Geneva, Saturday 18 June 2016

Room MR 170 – Unimail

Boulevard du Pont-d’Arve 40

The need for this colloquium

The forces that shape our academic world have been drastically disrupted by the arrival of the Internet, both because of the changes in the creation and diffusion of knowledge and because of the ease with which works can be borrowed, either wholesale or in an altered form.

These irreversible transformations can be broadly categorized as follows:

• The growth of knowledge production practices that are connected, collective and collaborative.
• The explosion of specialized, legitimized spheres for producing information and knowledge.
• An excess of information, a difficulty in distinguishing information from knowledge and in identifying relevant, reliable and high-quality information and knowledge that is appropriate for the demands of academic work.
• An obsolescence of information and knowledge and an immediacy brought about by the updating made possible by information technology.
• A supremacy of quantified evaluation indices (citation indices) and journal and institution rankings, which is producing an ever-greater pressure to publish.
• An absence of legal, academic, administrative and editorial frameworks appropriate for the new challenges, which is leading to a rapid rise in breaches of academic integrity and scientific fraud and plagiarism.

The forces acting on our professions inevitably lead to the most susceptible among our colleagues to slide from negligent conduct to amoral conduct and then to outright fraudulent conduct. The absence of a firm response to these breaches of integrity could lead brilliant colleagues and research partners to feel discouraged and abandon the profession.

The speed of transformation will lead to a weakening of our system of publishing and evaluating research, and as a result also of evaluating applications in the recruitment or promotion of research professors.

Agenda