Higher Ed Links ...

1. Kounteya Sinha in Economic Times: Doctors from IITs? Govt to Brainstorm Today:

   Some IITs, like Kharagpur and Hyderabad, are working on starting medical schools in about three years. Ministry officials said IIT Kharagpur has supposedly signed an MoU with University of California, San Diego, to set up a hospital which will offer graduate , PG and research programmes in medicine and bio-medical engineering.

   IIT Hyderabad has been expressing its interest to offer MD degrees in three years. In recent meetings with IIT directors, HRD minister Kapil Sibal had asked them to expand their courses.

2. Ding Jie in SciDev.Net: Science Paper Trade Booms in China:

   He defined five questionable paper-publishing practices in China: charging exorbitant publication fees, where instead of a peer review systems authors pay hundreds or thousands of yuan for publication in a journal; the establishment of illegitimate journals; ghostwriting of papers; paper brokering, where authors pay agencies to get their papers published in particular journals; and the fabrication of awards by illegitimate journals.

   This trade is a product of the way Chinese universities and research institutions use rates of publication as a measure of performance and eligibility for promotion or graduation, wrote Shen. Many institutions, for example, stipulate that doctoral candidates cannot gain their PhD unless they have published one paper before graduation.

   As a result, researchers and academics — particularly those in lesser universities or institutes — plagiarise or buy papers.