The Great Beyond

Nice and important news from Declan, thanks very much

As I was thinking about this yet another academic charade, a few other "relevant" items came to my mind, which I share but am not sure if they go far beyond your intended article or not.

As everyone may knows, Abdolkarim Soroush, then the Higher Ed Tsar of the early 80s was commissioned to "Islamicize" and :de-westernize" the curriculum. So, he closed down the university system for three years just to achieve that and purge immense number of faculty and students from these universities.

The main purpose behind it was to cleans the professors and put checks and balances in place to ensure the students do not lead yet another revolution as they do did during the Shah.. Soroush has joined the opposition to the regime in exile (Paris and New York) along with hundreds of other initial pillars of the "Islamic Revolution"

Now after the election, Khamenei has given another decree at a recent Friday Prayer to "reexamine" and once again "cleanse" the social sciences and other curriculum this time. This means another massive repression of the higher education and its overhaul directed by Daneshjou, leading to pre-selected freshmen who are loyal to the ideologues, and purging of another massive professors (hundreds) it happened to a lesser extent ( a few hundred ousted) a few years back.

Iran is indeed very rich in having some of the brightest and most educated technocrats, many of whom form Ivy Leagues of the west. However there seem to be a tendency on the part of the establishment to go with people possessing tarnished credentials or shabby backgrounds as they can never function independently, like the former group cited.

As stated earlier, I had read the first paper by Danshjou, but I had not seen the second Korean one, published in a much more reputable journal 7 years earlier. It is clearly a blatant case of plagiarism by Daneshjou, and disgrace for the Iranian academicians who are tarnished by such mischief. But agian, Mr. Khamenei and his lacky Mr. AhmadiNejad do need a disqualified person like Daneshjou as they do know of his shortcomings and illegal acts and thus exploits such items to their advantage of having him do their dirty job of purging the universities of anyone objective and independent as they are NOT tolerated by the system.

He is not Iran's science minister. He is the minister of Ahmadinejad's illegitimate government, who took power in a kind of coup after cheating in 2009 presidential election.

I know UMIST had delusions of grandeur. However I dont remember them ever referring to themselves as Imperial.

The Iranian Scientific Community is Not surprised with the News, since he (as the head of the presidential election) presumably had made the same cheating during the presidential election. Now, it is up to the parliament to impeach him for such an embarrassing pelgirism.

1. The work is novel
2. The second paper references to the first one.
3. The text may be written by the second author (which has less contribution)

Yes,
He is one of the men of president Ahmadinejad!
A man who was the election executive.He is a fake.election was faked.president is a fake.

I have checked both papers, yes it seems that the copy has been done and there are a lots of similarities between two papers. Even they have refered to the paper by Lee et. al (ref 32) but the name of journal is wrong. But still we could not say that was fault of Dr. Daneshjou, it could be done by that student working with him.

Another replica of the same article by Daneshjou is published here:
www.jmech.org.tw/pdf/25112.pdf

Where is the reference of your news?

Ir really surprises me this action from Nature.
I really reccomend to anyone to read completely two articles and compare them and then to dare to publish such a nonsense comments about Dr.Daneshjou.
Dr.Daneshjou just has used that article as reference.
If you pay attention to Dr.Daneshjou's Article,you will undrestand that this article is completely new and they have done many additive works.
Please Don't jugde with out reading two articles completely
Please don't provoke from bad situation that we have in Iran.

Conservative news site Alef (affiliated to MP Tavakkoli) has published this. This blog post may have triggered an impeachment!
Btw, it is possible that Mr. Daneshjou isn't even aware of this paper, and maybe the student working with him is responsible for the plagiarism. If you are familiar with common academic practices in Iran, you'll confirm this is quite common (unfortunately). You can find more information on the Persian blog Professors Against Plagiarism: http://profs-against-plagiarism.blogspot.com/ (whose last post is just about this case).

To Elham who claims that Mr. Daneshjoo’s paper is a new work:

Elham: There are explicit definitions for plagiarism in today's academic standards. If you copy and paste sentences, figures, etc. from another references without explicitly quoting and citing them, it is called plagiarism. There are plenty of sentences and figures copied and pasted from the previously published works in Mr. Daneshjoo's paper. He never uses "quotation marks" for the copied sentences to cite them. Only referring to the published paper at some point of your paper is not enough to eliminate the label of plagiarism.

Moreover, looking at the paper published in 2002, and comparing it to the one published in 2009, it only repeats the simulations with only a little modification. The big question is what is the contribution of the work? Isn't it just copying another paper's idea with only a few changes? This does not comply with the basic standards of academic publishing, and is called plagiarism!

Thank you for this post.

I second Saeid. I also add that although Danjeshjoo et al. cited the previous work (2002 Ref.32) in the end references, they don't cite it under figures that have been copied/pasted from 2002 paper. Instead, they cited other papers (e.g. in Fig.1 Ref.6,7).

The evidences are so many that one can not deny gross plagiarism in this case.

I am referring to those who blamed the student who wrote the paper. By their comments, it seems they are justifying the nonacademic behavior of a supervisor. I do not agree with the claim that this is common among all Iranian scientist. I know many supervisors in Iran that follow and check their PhD and MSc students research and papers carefully. One should not generalize, and even politicize such an ugly and nonacademic conduct of a person.

I am an iranian university student and i don't know what to say about this. I can just be sorried for myself.

WoW!!
Really .......

What can I say? I am really Surprised to see this. I am studying at the University of Tehran. How can I tell the students be honest on their academic products?

some of my friends says that this work may be done by his student, please find the article, so you will see that Dr. Daneshjoo is the corresponding author of the manuscript

Althogh I am not his fan, but we should not abuse of his mistake.

The paper by Woong et al is referenced(32nd reference) three times in section three of "experiments" apparently as their experiments have been redone but using their own alleged method. I have not read both papers thoroughly yet to see if Daneshjou et al paper is a novel approach or not compared to Woong et al, but I hope that the people at Nature have not made this a political issue before it was thoroughly investigated in the academic domain.

No, there is a mistake here.
I think those articles (2002,2003)duplicated the Daneshjo's paper in 2009.
we can prove this. you can ask Iran Central Bank to show it's documents.?!!?!?!

I am so sorry for this not legitimate government. There are a lot of researchers who work honestly and without support in Iran. what a shame this government is going to destroy their attempts.

Kordan, Mehrabian, Rahimi, Daneshjou, and ....

The Alef news site has published a response from the co-author of this paper, Majid Shahravi, who is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Daneshjou (in Persian): http://alef.ir/1388/content/view/54040/
He has enumerated the differences between his paper and the South Korean paper, marking his citation of the paper as evidence that he did not intend to plagiarize.

many research journals are not qualified. One Ph.D. student submitted his paper to a journal (springer) and the journal selectted the student's freind as referee.

I afraid why the four judges that read the article before accepting didn't realize that the article is a copy/past of another?
By the way, the 2002 article was also in the same field of research.

Are sure about your claim?

This is in response to those who beleive this can be the student's fault and Mr. Daneshjoo may have been unaware of this plagiarism. Why then Dr. Deneshjoo is listed as the First Author?! The First Author is supposed to be the one in charge of the work and is supposed to be completely aware of its novelty!

Oh my god!
He think scince is like election.

i`m an iranian
and i`m so soory for this
:(

I am Iranian
I shamed about Kamran Daneshjoo and ahmadinejad...
I hate Ahmadinejad

Hi everybody,

True or false, we are ashamed to hear such story. But, please pay attention that we can not generalize these stories to all scientists of Iran. Surely we can find many similar stories (plagiarism, data synthesis, etc..) from all of the word if we look carefuly, but according to political issues few of them are reported as nature did. Don't be affected by exagerated news and also don't deny them without through research.

God Bless You All

This is with reference to Mohammad's note regarding the co-author's explanation on Alef.

The response by Mr. Shahravi is perfectly insulting and arrogant. Instead of giving any reasonable justification to what he did, he is proudly criticizing Nature and he beleives that if some Reviewers accept a paper, then it means that it cannot be a plagiarism! How radiculus this way of reasoning is. As if reviewers were not just a few normal people with limited knowledge and as if they had access to all the literature and as if they were omniscient, and as if they were responsible to detect plagiarism, so to speak! Mr. Sharhravi had better write his response in English because his paper is in English and the Nature is in English too! Maybe he can ask someone to translate this to English for him because he cannot copy it from somewhere else!

I am sorry to say that the way he tries to justify his fault is a very common way people do in Iran nowadays thanks to what they have learned from their great politicians and religious authorities within past decades! It is such a pitty to see how deep this great country and cultrure has gone into corruption!

This, I am afraid is more of the rule than the exception in Iran, especially when it comes to publishing a science article in Persian and in Iranian journals for internal consumptions. I have witnessed so many papers of this kind, but since they most come form ordinary pre-doctoral students and their so called professors, the products of internal doctorates for domestic consumption only, no one would care or scrutinize it from within and without. It's only when a linchpin to Ahamdainejad does it that they raise hell and rightly so as well...

Immediate resignation if not impeachment by the Majlis if they have ethically driven political balls is the only solution to rid everyone of this misery...

Is Mr. Daneshjou aware of another replica paper which has been published in Journal of Mechanics, Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2009? you can find it at
www.jmech.org.tw/pdf/25112.pdf

Although some parts of the comment posted by Mr. Pirouz Azadi may be true, but what he mentioned about Dr. Soroush is totally false.
So I would like to recommend him not to go in the same direction as Daneshjou and Ahmadinejad by giving wrong information to people. You should not try to blemish a great character by giving false information and then expect people to believe your words about Mr. Ahmadinejad or Daneshou. You may be right about Mr. Ahmadinejad or Daneshjou but, Sorry, you just disqualified whatever you said because you failed to show a fair judgement and I think this mainly serves those who yout wrote against them!
So I think while we try to protest against the wrong situation and the injustice currently existing in our country we should be careful to be fair, NOT to use the same wrong methods, and NOT to blemish someone who always worked sincerely and faithfully for the welfare and progress of our nation and cultue. Blemishing people is what Ahmadinejad and his counterparts do and this is not our way!

Iranian scientists are respectful to science and copyright. One who do these things is no among the scientists of the world. I'm sorry about this happening.

Hi everybody
I think non of you has enough knowledge to judge that these two article are the same. the group in "Engineering with Computers" journal judged about the article clearly.So they recognized that this articl had a new idea, then they published it.
Do not talk about things that you don't know anything about it.

in these day i have heard such huge Prejudice lies and fake stories from US/UK Leaders that now i can barely accept these stories, even it`s from NATURE.

well. just imagine the man who is called a plagiarist now is the head of Iran's educational system.What a shame he is , what a shame this goverment is to Iranians.

To my believe, a full investigation should be conducted on the journal editors and those referrers who reviewed, revised and accepted the paper. it is very regrettable to see such reputable publisher as springer hosts this kind of journal that has failed to distinguish between a fake and original manuscript.

Dear Komeil,

Ha ! Do you know what plaigiarism does mean? Did you study the two papers? Did you compare them paragraph by paragraph? Didn't you that its definitly copy and paste (in significant parts)? So, you don't know what plaigiarism does mean. It is not related to the idea of the study, nor about the findings. It is about copy and paste because the authors just don't know how to write by their own words and copy and paste is a very simple, but unethical, way of writing a paper. "Do not talk about things that you don't know anything about it."

Hey Komeil,

Also, plz look at:
http://etemaad.ir/Released/88-07-09/103.htm#160851

Kamran accepted that the article has shared about 70% of the content of the previous one, but the study results are different. More than I'm ashamed from this plagiarism I wondered from their explanation "the study results are different" !!!

As a person who worked for a couple of years in Iran, I would recommend all international journals to search for plagiarism in all articles published by Iranian researchers especially those who had a job in government.