I agree with the general scope of the post and thank you for bringing this issue to the fore. This is such an important but also critical issue that whenever it comes up, those who raise concerns can be accused of xenophobia and even worse of racism. I see that when you gave the example of China, you felt the need to make a prior explanation for similar situations by saying “I do not want to encourage Sinophobia either”. The very fact that you feel the need to explain this shows how effective it is to abuse things, not only to misuse them, but also to manipulate them and suppress the opposing view.
Having said that, of course, I think that the example you have given is still relatively innocent in the context of the subject matter, even if it means something. You have summarized the CSC scheme very well. The CSC program has been in place for maybe decades between China and Western countries. There may be concerns and objections, of course, but at the end of the day it has always been a legal structure. If either side wants to end it, it doesn't work anymore. There are already countries that have abolished the CSC program in recent years.
Are you aware that there is a much bigger threat than the CSC program, which is more dangerous, untraceable, runs directly on the host country's resources without a sponsoring country like the Chinese government, while at the same time abusing the diversity and inclusion programs of universities? I mean Iran.
As your location is the Netherlands, the Dutch academia can be a nice example, because the Iranian threat I am talking about is not only in Europe, it is an academic network that is intriguingly interconnected to Iranian research groups in almost every country in the world. I am talking about papermills, citation manipulation, nepotism in recruitment, nepotism in the distribution of research funds in a country. And of course, the fact that all of this is Iran-centered makes it easy for information in Western countries to be transferred to Iran. The closest example of this is the Shahed drones that Russia is using in Ukraine today and the Iranian satellites that are integrated into these drones. Each of these is more dangerous than the Chinese threat you mentioned because they are very difficult to trace.
Western countries have long since welcomed Iranian researchers into their universities, especially in technical departments. At first this was purely humanitarian. People who didn't want to live under a repressive regime, but believed they could make a contribution to society, were given these opportunities in many Western countries. However, today we see that, with the concept of diversity and inclusion, these people who had the opportunity to pursue their careers in different countries around the world have, over the past decades, not only established academic groups in their own locations that only Iranians can benefit from, but have also established an informal network with Iranian groups in different parts of the world. Dear Dr. Aquarius, you can easily observe the points I mentioned below in your own country because your country is a popular Iranian papermilling station. With this network, basically;
(A) A mediocre engineering student from any university in Iran can very easily be accepted into a PhD program in the US, Canada, Europe or Australia. This is because Iranian professors who are already in high positions in these countries are bending the rule of diversity and inclusiveness that was once given to them in favor of their own people.
(B) Iranian researchers in any Western country can easily strengthen their academic record through Iran-based papermill organizations in Iran and become popular researchers with high citation counts and a high h-index in order to distinguish themselves in competition with their colleagues in the country they are located. In this way, they can obtain more academic funding and prioritize Iranians when hiring with the funding (see point A).
(C) There is a very strong Iranian grouping, especially in the engineering fields. This is of course the result of decades of humanitarian support programmes for Iranian researchers. However, today, for example, a project proposal by an Iranian researcher in the Netherlands for funding from the European Union may reach another Iranian professor working in the same field through a single-blind review process, and this project proposal may receive an unfairly high score just because of ethnic affinity. This scenario is not a possibility, it is a reality. And it is easy to prove it, if the fund managers so wish. I would like to note that, of course, another ethnic group can commit the same abuse, but I have never seen a Canadian or an American unfairly over-scoring a proposal in favour of another Canadian or American.
(D) An Iranian professor in the Netherlands may like the topic of a project won by another researcher in the Netherlands and then the professor pass on the same idea to his Iranian friend in Canada. It is almost impossible to identify similarities between the projects because they are not in the same country. At the end of the day, however, the fact that academic careers are built on the ideas of others and that an ethnically based diaspora is further strengthened is something that everyone is aware of but is afraid to speak out about.
(E) Iranian professors in Europe can host many Iranian researchers who completed their PhD in Iran for 1-3 years at their universities, either as visiting researchers or even through the postdoctoral programmes of the European Union (I think it's called the Marie Curie programme), and then through this network they can either become professors in another Western country or return to Iran and get involved in the engineering processes of the Iranian regime. Have Western countries taken any measures against this so far? Of course not.
(F) Iranian academic groups, which can monopolise globally in certain engineering fields, also allow the publication of many substandard works in academic journals, both as editors and reviewers. I have exemplified above what the increasing number of citations and h-indexes have led to.
As I mentioned at the outset, unlike the CSC program and its scope, these examples are very difficult to trace because they are not created by bilateral agreements, but by the unfortunate abuse of the tolerance that was created years ago by the humanitarian approach of people. And it is still not seriously discussed in any Western country. Only forbetterscience occasionally makes very good points and keeps it on the agenda.
Thank you so much for reading the blog post in such detail and for your lengthy and intricate response. It is much appreciated! In fact, you are doing exactly what I hoped would happen after writing this post: to discuss research security!
Maybe good to know that my intention with this blog post was not to be comprehensive on the topic of research security, how could I, in just a few hundred words? I was hoping to give a bit of a brief synopsis and a more concrete example.
The examples and possibilities you have posted sound interesting, but would become even stronger with additional sources and references so others could read up on this as well.
Again, thank you once more for your insightful post.
Much obliged for your reply. I realize it is not easy to cover such a comprehensive subject in a few hundred words. I wanted to write a long and detailed comment as it is a very important topic. Thank you for your understanding. Regarding your suggestion, I would like to elaborate on them with a few examples. I have listed below examples for each of the points I mentioned in my first comment. I hope this will be useful.
So how did Behzadi's adventure begin? As can be seen from For Better Science's recent post, Behzadi first came to Denmark as a research assistant from a university in Iran many years ago, thanks to another Iranian papermill, Ahmad Arabkoohsar. He has many manipulative citations and articles with Arabkoohsar ( please check their pubpeer records). By following the ORCID records we can see that when Arabkoohsar got an academic position at Aalborg University, he abused the concept of diversity and inclusiveness, which is a general rule in Western universities, for the benefit of ordinary students in his own country and hired people from Iran who are skilled in the papermill business. Behzadi is just one example.
(B) Following the example above, Arabkoohsar, who increased his citations and number of papers at Aalborg University with papermills, is now a Full Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. And if you look at his team members on the web, you can see that although he has received lots of funding from the European Commission and Denmark, he hired Iranian students and postdoctoral researchers who are good at papermill business. Just one example, Hossein Nabat, another ordinary student who started his PhD in 2023, has 982 citations in his Google Scholar record. His H-index is 11.
In short, as an Iranian researcher in the West, you can lean on the Iran-based papermill trade to increase your citations and articles, and so get promoted more easily than your colleagues in your host country. You can even transfer to prestigious universities. More senior positions at prestigious universities can make it easier for you to get projects from the European Commission and research funds of the country you are in. So with the funds you get, you can hire young people from Iran who can continue the papermill trade. So, once you get into that profitable cycle -more papers, easy promotion, more funding, more hiring of young papermillers- in Western universities with the papermill trade, once you move up, there is no stopping you.
Iranian papermillers are undoubtedly the winners here. And the loser? The taxpayers who feed the nations' research budgets and the nations' innovation strategies. Because where papermill names are popular, there can be nothing but pseudoscience. And that means lack of innovation. Dr. Aquarius, I mentioned European examples from RW and FBS because your location is Europe. How much quality research do you think Europe can do in this situation? Of course, we have to talk about another loser. And that is the concept of diversity and inclusiveness. This wonderful concept, which was created to allow good researchers to make the best contribution without discrimination, is being abused by Iranian papermills, not only by putting Iranian papermill names in front of good researchers, but also by publicizing that the concept of diversity is a hoax.
I could mention specific names for (C) and (D) but that would be risky. We know that if the funding agencies can evaluate the applicants and reviewers thoroughly and catch the Iranian papermilling relationship between them, they can see that many project ideas are unfairly and easily supported by reviewers.
There is no need to mention specific examples for (F). We read about the Iranian papermilling activities of Elsevier's editorial boards and guest editors almost every month with a new disgrace.
Hope these examples will be useful for the readers.
I agree with the general scope of the post and thank you for bringing this issue to the fore. This is such an important but also critical issue that whenever it comes up, those who raise concerns can be accused of xenophobia and even worse of racism. I see that when you gave the example of China, you felt the need to make a prior explanation for similar situations by saying “I do not want to encourage Sinophobia either”. The very fact that you feel the need to explain this shows how effective it is to abuse things, not only to misuse them, but also to manipulate them and suppress the opposing view.
Having said that, of course, I think that the example you have given is still relatively innocent in the context of the subject matter, even if it means something. You have summarized the CSC scheme very well. The CSC program has been in place for maybe decades between China and Western countries. There may be concerns and objections, of course, but at the end of the day it has always been a legal structure. If either side wants to end it, it doesn't work anymore. There are already countries that have abolished the CSC program in recent years.
Are you aware that there is a much bigger threat than the CSC program, which is more dangerous, untraceable, runs directly on the host country's resources without a sponsoring country like the Chinese government, while at the same time abusing the diversity and inclusion programs of universities? I mean Iran.
As your location is the Netherlands, the Dutch academia can be a nice example, because the Iranian threat I am talking about is not only in Europe, it is an academic network that is intriguingly interconnected to Iranian research groups in almost every country in the world. I am talking about papermills, citation manipulation, nepotism in recruitment, nepotism in the distribution of research funds in a country. And of course, the fact that all of this is Iran-centered makes it easy for information in Western countries to be transferred to Iran. The closest example of this is the Shahed drones that Russia is using in Ukraine today and the Iranian satellites that are integrated into these drones. Each of these is more dangerous than the Chinese threat you mentioned because they are very difficult to trace.
Western countries have long since welcomed Iranian researchers into their universities, especially in technical departments. At first this was purely humanitarian. People who didn't want to live under a repressive regime, but believed they could make a contribution to society, were given these opportunities in many Western countries. However, today we see that, with the concept of diversity and inclusion, these people who had the opportunity to pursue their careers in different countries around the world have, over the past decades, not only established academic groups in their own locations that only Iranians can benefit from, but have also established an informal network with Iranian groups in different parts of the world. Dear Dr. Aquarius, you can easily observe the points I mentioned below in your own country because your country is a popular Iranian papermilling station. With this network, basically;
(A) A mediocre engineering student from any university in Iran can very easily be accepted into a PhD program in the US, Canada, Europe or Australia. This is because Iranian professors who are already in high positions in these countries are bending the rule of diversity and inclusiveness that was once given to them in favor of their own people.
(B) Iranian researchers in any Western country can easily strengthen their academic record through Iran-based papermill organizations in Iran and become popular researchers with high citation counts and a high h-index in order to distinguish themselves in competition with their colleagues in the country they are located. In this way, they can obtain more academic funding and prioritize Iranians when hiring with the funding (see point A).
(C) There is a very strong Iranian grouping, especially in the engineering fields. This is of course the result of decades of humanitarian support programmes for Iranian researchers. However, today, for example, a project proposal by an Iranian researcher in the Netherlands for funding from the European Union may reach another Iranian professor working in the same field through a single-blind review process, and this project proposal may receive an unfairly high score just because of ethnic affinity. This scenario is not a possibility, it is a reality. And it is easy to prove it, if the fund managers so wish. I would like to note that, of course, another ethnic group can commit the same abuse, but I have never seen a Canadian or an American unfairly over-scoring a proposal in favour of another Canadian or American.
(D) An Iranian professor in the Netherlands may like the topic of a project won by another researcher in the Netherlands and then the professor pass on the same idea to his Iranian friend in Canada. It is almost impossible to identify similarities between the projects because they are not in the same country. At the end of the day, however, the fact that academic careers are built on the ideas of others and that an ethnically based diaspora is further strengthened is something that everyone is aware of but is afraid to speak out about.
(E) Iranian professors in Europe can host many Iranian researchers who completed their PhD in Iran for 1-3 years at their universities, either as visiting researchers or even through the postdoctoral programmes of the European Union (I think it's called the Marie Curie programme), and then through this network they can either become professors in another Western country or return to Iran and get involved in the engineering processes of the Iranian regime. Have Western countries taken any measures against this so far? Of course not.
(F) Iranian academic groups, which can monopolise globally in certain engineering fields, also allow the publication of many substandard works in academic journals, both as editors and reviewers. I have exemplified above what the increasing number of citations and h-indexes have led to.
As I mentioned at the outset, unlike the CSC program and its scope, these examples are very difficult to trace because they are not created by bilateral agreements, but by the unfortunate abuse of the tolerance that was created years ago by the humanitarian approach of people. And it is still not seriously discussed in any Western country. Only forbetterscience occasionally makes very good points and keeps it on the agenda.
Thanks for this nice post.
Dear guest,
Thank you so much for reading the blog post in such detail and for your lengthy and intricate response. It is much appreciated! In fact, you are doing exactly what I hoped would happen after writing this post: to discuss research security!
Maybe good to know that my intention with this blog post was not to be comprehensive on the topic of research security, how could I, in just a few hundred words? I was hoping to give a bit of a brief synopsis and a more concrete example.
The examples and possibilities you have posted sound interesting, but would become even stronger with additional sources and references so others could read up on this as well.
Again, thank you once more for your insightful post.
Best,
Rene
Dear Dr Aquarius,
Much obliged for your reply. I realize it is not easy to cover such a comprehensive subject in a few hundred words. I wanted to write a long and detailed comment as it is a very important topic. Thank you for your understanding. Regarding your suggestion, I would like to elaborate on them with a few examples. I have listed below examples for each of the points I mentioned in my first comment. I hope this will be useful.
(A) I could start with a PhD student who was a hot topic on both Retraction Watch and For Better Science. Amirmohammad Behzadi, currently a PhD student at KTH. As a PhD student he already has 2729 citations and 29 h-indexes. Higher than many professors. After Behzadi's current supervisor, Sadrizadeh, made headlines on RW last year by claiming that his own work had been duplicated by an Iraqi group https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/04/elsevier-withdraws-plagiarized-paper-after-original-author-calls-journal-out-on-linkedin/ , it turned out that his own student's background was not so clean either https://forbetterscience.com/2024/07/12/schneider-shorts-12-07-2024-disinformation-hate-fake-news-attacks-by-foreign-intelligence-services-and-internet-troll-farms/#rw . However, Sadrizadeh, who freely criticizes others, tried to dismiss his own student's manipulation of citations and articles with simple explanations https://retractionwatch.com/2024/08/29/researcher-whose-work-was-plagiarized-haunted-by-impostor-emails/ . The latest article on this issue comes from For Better Science: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/09/02/anyone-can-start-a-papermill/ . Please also read the comments on these links. You can see that a lot of different information is also provided in the comments.
So how did Behzadi's adventure begin? As can be seen from For Better Science's recent post, Behzadi first came to Denmark as a research assistant from a university in Iran many years ago, thanks to another Iranian papermill, Ahmad Arabkoohsar. He has many manipulative citations and articles with Arabkoohsar ( please check their pubpeer records). By following the ORCID records we can see that when Arabkoohsar got an academic position at Aalborg University, he abused the concept of diversity and inclusiveness, which is a general rule in Western universities, for the benefit of ordinary students in his own country and hired people from Iran who are skilled in the papermill business. Behzadi is just one example.
(B) Following the example above, Arabkoohsar, who increased his citations and number of papers at Aalborg University with papermills, is now a Full Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. And if you look at his team members on the web, you can see that although he has received lots of funding from the European Commission and Denmark, he hired Iranian students and postdoctoral researchers who are good at papermill business. Just one example, Hossein Nabat, another ordinary student who started his PhD in 2023, has 982 citations in his Google Scholar record. His H-index is 11.
In short, as an Iranian researcher in the West, you can lean on the Iran-based papermill trade to increase your citations and articles, and so get promoted more easily than your colleagues in your host country. You can even transfer to prestigious universities. More senior positions at prestigious universities can make it easier for you to get projects from the European Commission and research funds of the country you are in. So with the funds you get, you can hire young people from Iran who can continue the papermill trade. So, once you get into that profitable cycle -more papers, easy promotion, more funding, more hiring of young papermillers- in Western universities with the papermill trade, once you move up, there is no stopping you.
Iranian papermillers are undoubtedly the winners here. And the loser? The taxpayers who feed the nations' research budgets and the nations' innovation strategies. Because where papermill names are popular, there can be nothing but pseudoscience. And that means lack of innovation. Dr. Aquarius, I mentioned European examples from RW and FBS because your location is Europe. How much quality research do you think Europe can do in this situation? Of course, we have to talk about another loser. And that is the concept of diversity and inclusiveness. This wonderful concept, which was created to allow good researchers to make the best contribution without discrimination, is being abused by Iranian papermills, not only by putting Iranian papermill names in front of good researchers, but also by publicizing that the concept of diversity is a hoax.
I could mention specific names for (C) and (D) but that would be risky. We know that if the funding agencies can evaluate the applicants and reviewers thoroughly and catch the Iranian papermilling relationship between them, they can see that many project ideas are unfairly and easily supported by reviewers.
(E) Two examples of this may be useful. The first is through the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/14/academics-in-us-uk-and-australia-collaborated-on-drone-research-with-iranian-university-close-to-regime . Researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia originate from Iran. Iran is where they collaborate. If people are fleeing Iran because of the repressive regime, why do they go there and engage in academic activities that support that regime?
The second example is from Denmark and the Netherlands, through Pubpeer: https://pubpeer.com/publications/89E9742DD0BFF7BFBE6A0348635B6B . Please see Acknowledgement at the end of the comment. You will see that the duplicated work is linked to the Iran Space Institute. In addition to these two examples, there are dozens of similar examples from Canada because the vast majority of Canada's technical departments are filled with Iranian papermill names that cannot be traced, abusing the concept of diversity and inclusiveness. I attach the article from FBS here as an example: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/05/31/dr-mohammad-arjmand-showcases-his-work-to-german-president-steinmeier/
There is no need to mention specific examples for (F). We read about the Iranian papermilling activities of Elsevier's editorial boards and guest editors almost every month with a new disgrace.
Hope these examples will be useful for the readers.