President Bajram Begaj is accused of academic plagiarism

The President of the Republic Bajram Begaj on Monday held a decree ceremony for the new rectors of public universities in the country, ignoring the accusations of plagiarism against the re-elected rector of the University of Tirana, Artan Hoxha.

While demanding from the new rectors "improvement of scientific research", Begaj, a doctor by profession who holds the scientific title "Associate Professor" himself faced accusations of plagiarism for a scientific article published in 2014.

The accusations came from researcher Taulant Muka, who claimed that the article co-authored by Begajn was copied 100 percent from North American Society of Obstetrical Medicine lecture materials.

According to Muka, in addition to the text, the president also sets the data for the USA as data for our country.

"Now the president is added to the long list of many political figures who have built their academic careers on the theft of intellectual property", he writes on the social network 'Facebook'.

Both online materials published by the researcher are apparently the same, but in a response to BIRN, presidential spokesperson Arta Sakja claimed that "every data is referenced according to the criteria set by the methodology of academic works".

According to the presidency, the magazine where the article was published was "a magazine with high standards" and that it was published "after going through strong filters and a special evaluation committee".

But Muka also calls the position of the presidency a plagiarism, stressing that it is not the magazine that determines whether it is plagiarism or not.

"This argument was also used by the former minister of education, showing an inferiority towards internationalism instead of importance for true scientific values", he told BIRN.

"Civic Attitude", a civil organization that deals with problems in education, also reacted to the case, according to which, quality education cannot be achieved with "plagiarist" leaders.

Executive director Rigels Xhemollari told BIRN that the presidency's argument does not hold and that the case denounced by Muka leaves no room for discussing whether the references were cited or not.

"This is 100 percent plagiarism," he said. "It is clear in the article that the president took data from 2004 and published it 10 years later, he took data from the USA and disguised it as data from Albania", added Xhemollari.

The scientific article entitled "Assessment and management of gastrointestinal disorders during pregnancy" co-authored by Bajram Begaj and Rustem Celami was published in 2014 in the journal "Advances in Life Science and Technology", a journal that is not ranked in the scientific impact platforms, 'Thomson Reuters' and 'Scopus'.

Ranking on these platforms is required by the Albanian Higher Education Law as a condition for obtaining an academic title.

Any researcher can publish articles in this journal for a fee ranging from USD 160 to USD 325.

The new rector of the University of Medicine, Xheladin Dracini, who was decreed yesterday by Begaj, did not answer until the publication of this article if the article in question was used in the file to win the scientific title by Begaj.

During the university elections in June, the University of Tirana and the Ministry of Education remained silent after the publication by Muka of two reports according to which the rector of the University of Tirana, Artan Hoxha and the dean of the Faculty of Law, Dorina Hoxha, had plagiarized their doctoral theses.

The verification of the scientific works of the academic staff at the University of Tirana was one of the main demands of the students in the mass protests of 2018. The government promised them that this verification would be carried out.

Then the Ministry of Education concluded an agreement with an electronic platform that would enable this verification, but the process was not followed and did not produce results. In 2020, the ministry transferred the verification obligations to the university itself, but since the year when this initiative was taken, there has been no case of plagiarism caught by the institutions. Reporter.al