Laković: For the director of the Historical Institute of Montenegro, they want to choose a person who plagiarizes works

SOURCE: POBJEDA / M.J.
Dr. Ivan Laković, senior research associate at the Institute of History of the University of Montenegro addressed Antena M claiming that Radenko Šćekić, who was chosen as a candidate for the director of the Institute, does not meet the requirements for that position. He claims that Šćekić's work violated a number of basic ethical and scientific norms, accusing him of plagiarism.
We are transcribing his speech in its entirety:
"At the election session of the Council of the Institute of History on November 22, 2023, a majority of votes approved the proposal that Dr. Radenko Šćekić, scientific adviser, be elected as the director of the Institute of History of the UCG. As a candidate who did not receive sufficient support on the Council, I do not question any formal segment of the conducted election process. In some other circumstances, this would be just another election cycle repeated every three years. However, the elected fellow has violated a number of basic ethical and scientific norms in his work so far, compromising his academic reputation to the extent that his appointment as director would be a blow to the dignity not only of this institution, but also of the entire University.
The candidate was internally reprimanded several times for non-academic actions and formally punished with a Public Reprimand from the UCG Court of Honor for violating the Code of Ethics, and even worse, he was disowned by evidence that he had plagiarized his scientific papers. The last in that series is a text entitled Wealth of diversity - Preservation of cultural identity in the time of globalization, published in the monograph Montenegro on the political and cultural map of Europe - CLIO MAP. By controlling plagiarism through software specially obtained from the University of Montenegro, after conversion to Latin, a percentage of 52% matching with content already available on the Internet was determined. So, more than half of the work, and not individual words or phrases, but entire continuous groups of sentences, paragraphs and pages. For example, the section under the subtitle Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul (p. 274-276) consists of directly copied parts of the text from Wikipedia, the Analitika portal, and a few other web presentations that are not mentioned anywhere. As, after each section, the author cited sources and literature in the footnotes, here that segment is directly copied from the page on Wikipedia (including the error found there).
The text was additionally checked through several freely available anti-plagiarism programs, and the results varied only in the percentage of identification of matches, but not whether they exist.
In the foundations of doing science is the obligation to maintain a high level of ethics and academic honesty, either in research methodology or in the way of presenting the obtained results. Scientific works are the origins of one's own research interests, where existing knowledge is used in a clearly defined manner, but must not be falsely presented as one's own. No less, no more.
Although the above should be more than enough to reject this candidacy, the Board of Directors of UCG did not accept the appeal that was filed because of it. According to the Appeal Decision, the record of previous disciplinary violations is not treated as an obstacle for confirming the election of a candidate for director. The proof-supported indication of plagiarism was amortized under the pretext of formal incompetence, instead of, upon learning of such a violation of the basic rules of academic ethics, proceedings were automatically initiated at the UCG Ethics Committee and this candidacy was stopped. One almost gets the impression of turning one's head away from the illegal and non-academic behavior of the candidate for the head of a scientific institution, by looking for a formal excuse to ignore this and present it as irrelevant, despite the submitted documentation that confirms every allegation.
When the members of the UCG Board of Directors, with the opinion of the rector, at the next session make a final decision on this issue, they should refuse to confirm this candidacy. In accordance with their powers, they can appoint an acting director of the Historical Institute, until a person of unquestionable scientific reputation and academic integrity is elected to that position. Otherwise, what kind of message would that send to scientific workers who competently stand behind the content of their texts, as well as to students who learn that copy/paste is not a standard and acceptable technique for writing scientific papers, no matter how much it "saves" time and energy?"