The Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan intends to strengthen control over the activity of the dissertation councils. Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences will not review works of researchers caught by Dissernet in plagiarism. At the same time, it will strengthen control over the thesis defense process.
“We have applied with an official letter to the Higher Attestation Commission, or VAK, of Russia’s Ministry of Education and Sciences asking to give an assessment to recent statements made by Dissernet over theses defended by some Tajik researchers and government officials,” said Qosimsho Iskandarov, Chief Scientific Secretary to the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan. “I. Mitskevich, Chief Scientific Secretary to Russia’s VAK noted in the reply letter that the Dissernet website has nothing to do with Russia’s VAK. Position of persons posted on this website is their own position and is not the official point of view of VAK.”
He further noted that theses of Tajik researchers and government officials, who have been busted for academic plagiarism, have been approved by Russia’s VAK.
According to him, there are twenty-two dissertation councils subordinate to Russia’s VAK functioning in Tajikistan. Besides, there are forty-three dissertation councils that are subordinate to Tajikistan’s VAK. There are also several interstate dissertation councils functioning in Tajikistan.
Recall, dozens of Tajik researchers and government officials have been busted for academic plagiarism over the last few weeks. The detective work was done by Dissernet, a volunteer community in Russia which has delighted since 2013 in uncovering similar feats of scholarly theft by officials in that country.
Dissernet makes the exercise of comparing and contrasting the plagiarists’ work with the original easy by creating side-by-side tables of the copied sections and the source.
Tajik authorities, meanwhile, have unleashed whispering and state-media campaigns against Dissernet to paper over the embarrassment.
Defenders of the accused officials on social media have suggested the Russian group was hired to carry out the hatchet job. Representatives from several ministries and government departments assembled for a roundtable on April 26 to make a public statement about the unfolding scandal. In a statement posted on the website of Khovar state-run news agency, the roundtable concluded that Dissernet’s reports were a threat to Tajikistan’s “information security” and that the group was taking money to undermine the government and the country’s values.
Tajikistan created its own Higher Attestation Commission, government body responsible for overseeing the process of evaluating advanced academic theses, only in 2014 and some experts consider that it will take a long time to build up its own digital database to help prevent plagiarism.
