The journal Transport today retracted a 2006 paper co-authored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran’s transport minister, and two other scientists. In a news article published yesterday, Nature had drawn attention to the fact that the paper (“Providing a decreasing congestion probability model for urban streets network”) contained large amounts of text identical with that of three earlier articles by other researchers. The retraction statement can be found here.

In a response yesterday that was attributed to Behbahani, he defended the article – see statement (in Persian) on the Iranian news site Alef.ir.

As also reported by Nature yesterday, over the past week other journals have said they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, three papers co-authored by Iran’s science minister Kamran Daneshjou.