أشهر مجلة عملية تكتب عن
فضيحـة شــراء الأبحــاث عالمياً في جامعة الملك عبدالعزيز وجامعة الملك سعود
Science
Magazine 9 December 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6061 pp. 1344-1345
DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6061.1344
Vol. 334 no. 6061 pp. 1344-1345
DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6061.1344
Saudi Universities Offer
Cash in Exchange for Academic Prestige
Two Saudi institutions are aggressively acquiring the affiliations
of overseas scientists with an eye to gaining visibility in research journals.
At first glance, Robert Kirshner took
the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU)
in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship
that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard
University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a
week or two a year on KAU's campus, but that requirement was flexible, the
person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to
do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his
name on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI's) list of highly cited
researchers.
“I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner,
who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money
was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get.
Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution
had accepted KAU's offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.
Kirshner's colleague is not
alone. Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked
researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI's highly cited
list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the
university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered.
Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in
Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past
4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching
KSU's name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved
any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.
Academics both inside and outside
Saudi Arabia warn that such practices could detract from the genuine efforts
that Saudi Arabia's universities are making to transform themselves into
world-class research centers. For instance, the Saudi government has spent
billions of dollars to build the new King Abdullah University of Science and
Technology in Thuwal, which boasts state-of-the-art labs and dozens of
prominent researchers as full-time faculty members (Science, 16 October
2009, p. 354).
But the initiatives at KSU and KAU are
aimed at getting speedier results. “They are simply buying names,” says
Mohammed Al-Qunaibet, a professor of agricultural economics at KSU, who
recently criticized the programs in an article he wrote for the leading Saudi
newspaper, Al Hayat. Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for
Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina, says the programs
deliberately create “a false impression that these universities are producing
great research.”
Academics who have accepted KAU's
offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United
States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus
professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have
changed their affiliation on ISI's highly cited list—as required by KAU's
contract—and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers. Other
requirements in the contract include devoting “the whole of your time,
attention, skill and abilities to the performance of your duties” and doing
“work equivalent to a total of 4 months per contract period.”
Neil Robertson, a professor emeritus
of mathematics at Ohio State University in Columbus who has signed on, says he
has no concerns about the offer. “It's just capitalism,” he says. “They have
the capital and they want to build something out of it.” Another KAU affiliate,
astronomer Gerry Gilmore of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom,
notes that “universities buy people's reputations all the time. In principle,
this is no different from Harvard hiring a prominent researcher.”
Officials at KAU did not respond
to Science's request for an interview. But Surender Jain, a retired
mathematics professor from Ohio University in Athens who is an adviser to KAU
and has helped recruit several of the adjuncts, provided a list of 61 academics
who have signed contracts similar to the one sent to Kirshner. The financial
arrangements in the contracts vary, Jain says: For instance, some adjuncts will
receive their compensation not as salary but as part of a research grant
provided by KAU.
Jain acknowledges that a primary goal
of the program—funded by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Higher Education—is to “improve
the visibility and ranking of King Abdulaziz University.” But he says KAU also
hopes the foreign academics will help it kick-start indigenous research
programs. “We're not just giving away money,” he says. Most recruits will be
expected to visit for a total of 4 weeks in a year to “give crash courses”;
they will also be expected to supervise dissertations and help KAU's full-time
faculty members develop research proposals. Even the “shadows” of such eminent
scholars would inspire local students and faculty members, he says.
The recruits Science spoke
to say they have a genuine interest in promoting research at KAU, even though
none of them knew how their individual research plans would match up with the
interests and abilities of KAU's faculty members and students. Ray Carlberg, an
astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada who accepted the offer, says
he had to Google the university after he received the e-mail. He admits that he
was initially concerned that KAU might be simply buying his name but became
convinced that the university was sincere about tapping his expertise in doing
research. Carlberg has submitted a proposal to KAU to fund a telescope that he
wants to build on an island in the Canadian Arctic; if that proposal is
accepted, he says, there would be opportunities to involve faculty members and
students from KAU in the project.
“Yes, visibility is very important to
them, but they also want to start a Ph.D. program in mathematics,” says
Robertson, who says he hopes outside influence will help accelerate social
reforms in the oil-rich kingdom. “I'm thinking this might be a breath of fresh
air in a closed society.”
Jain says KAU has taken a cue from
KSU, which launched a major drive 3 years ago to boost its international
ranking. The man behind it was Abdullah Al-Othman, who earned a Ph.D. in
nutritional sciences from the University of Arizona in 1992 and was an
undersecretary in the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education before he was
appointed president of KSU in 2008.
Al-Othman took over at a time when
Saudi universities were being criticized in the Saudi media for their poor
showing in international university rankings. Out of 3000 universities ranked
by Webometrics in 2006, KSU ranked 2910th while KAU fared only slightly better
at 2785th. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), another
leading Saudi institution, was ranked 1681. None of these universities was in
the top 500 list published by the Shanghai-based Academic Ranking of World
Universities in 2008.
Al-Othman launched two programs at KSU
to turn things around. One was the Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Program
(DSFP), whose Web site says it aims to “increase the number of highly cited
researchers affiliated with KSU” and to “initiate joint research activities between
International researcher [sic] who have the potential to publish
in Nature and ScienceJournals.” The other
initiative was a visiting professorship program, whose contract—a copy of which
has been obtained by Science—stipulates that the visiting professor
should publish five articles per year in ISI-indexed journals. The contract
also offers to pay the visiting professor an amount for every paper co-authored
with KSU's staffin an ISI-listed publication.
Al-Othman wanted quick results, and he
got them. KSU soon signed on several top-ranked scientists from Europe, Asia,
and the United States, who sent the number of KSU-affiliated publications
zooming to 1211 in 2010, nearly three times the figure for 2008. Little of the
work these articles describe was done at KSU, says Abdulqader Alhaider, a
pharmacology professor at KSU. As a result, in 2010, KSU broke into the
300-to-400 bracket of universities in the Shanghai rankings; the September 2011
Shanghai rankings placed it in the 200-to-300 bracket. On Webometrics's latest
ranking, KSU is at 186th place—far ahead of where it was in 2006. (KFUPM—which
has made a similar push for prestige—is now in the 300-to-400 bracket in the
Shanghai rankings.)
In their criticisms of Al-Othman's
impact-raising strategy, Alhaider and Al-Qunaibet point to its effects on the
publication record of Khaled Al-Rasheid, a zoologist who directs DSFP.
Al-Rasheid started as a professor at KSU in 1992 after completing a Ph.D. at
the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom on the effect of heavy
metals on ciliates. For the next 15 years at the university, he averaged about
four research publications a year, many of them in Middle Eastern journals.
Since 2008, however—when the
university started DSFP under his leadership—Al-Rasheid has become amazingly
prolific. He has been a co-author of 139 research papers, including 49 papers
in 2010 and 36 to date this year. Most of these publications, co-authored with
researchers around the world, acknowledge financial support from the Center of Excellence
for Research in Biodiversity at KSU, which Al-Rasheid directs. Some of the
papers have been co-authored with researchers hired by KSU under the
distinguished scientist program. One paper, on the biochemistry of Venus
flytraps—published in October in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences—listed seven co-authors in addition to Al-Rasheid,
including Nobelist Erwin Neher of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical
Chemistry in Göttingen and Rainer Hedrich of the University of Würzberg, both
in Germany. Neher and Hedrich are both distinguished fellows at KSU.
Speaking to Science,
Al-Rasheid acknowledged that the dramatic increase in his footprint in the
scientific literature had come about as a result of money invested by KSU. But
he denied that he had earned authorship on any paper by virtue of the
university's providing financial support or direct compensation to foreign
researchers. He said he'd simply been working hard, noting that he was calling
this reporter from his office at close to midnight in Saudi Arabia, “and it's
still early for me.” He also explained that in his field of taxonomy, “results
are swift—even 70 to 80 papers a year is not unusual. I have been to so many
conferences over the years. I have started so many collaborations. I am lucky
that I could attract so many people to work with me.”
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