By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Four years after Ashutosh Tiwari’s scamferences and research fraud were exposed, his impressive-sounding yet fictional “International Association of Advanced Materials”, or IAAM, still opens doors, hearts and wallets.
Smut Clyde tells you about some abysmally bad scamferences and the kind of scholars frequenting them, and I explain why Nobel Prize winner Harald zur Hausen is one of them.
Ashutosh Tiwari’s scamference activities continue. Now the University of Magdeburg in Germany is very excited about a medal from the International Association of Advanced Materials.
“A complex fraud involving a Greek scientist and her network of international researchers has been uncovered by investigators from the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).”
The German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, advertises for Ashutosh Tiwari’s predatory conferences. Occasion: Academician Herbert Gleiter won an IAAM Award.
Germany recruits the very best of the best in international science to its elite institutions. Professor Alexandr Bazhin is one of them.
Ashutosh Tiwari and his patron Tony Turner were found guilty of research misconduct by Linköping University. Turner is to be sacked as EiC of his Elsevier journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a paper he tried to correct there will be retracted. Meanwhile, Tiwari and his LiU colleague Mikael Syväjärvi started a new business: they offer heart surgeries in India.
The last act of the Ashutosh Tiwari travesty at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden took place. Tiwari, the fake professor and master of predatory conferences, tripped only over his vanity of gift co-authorship on 3 papers by his Allahabad mate Prashant Sharma, a shameless nanotechnology data faker with presently 26 retractions.
Research by German journalists revealed whole lists of German academics engaging in predatory publishing and scamferences. Named on over 60 predatory conference papers is Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Rector of the University of Bremen and former Vice-President of DFG. Several such papers are even self-plagiarised, and were used in DFG project reports and Scholz-Reiter’s rectorship application from 2011
The predatory conferences organised by Ashutosh Tiwari became now a comparatively modest affair. Tiwari stopped pretending being a LiU professor and even ceased signing his conference invitations. Internet announcements for his conference scams became rather minimalistic, while conference programmes or lists of speakers are not released to participants and are apparently arranged on the spot.
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