2023-04-19 15:05:48
70.000 euros was willing to pay Saudi Arabia to falsely link his work to one of his universities. The intention is to use the prestige of the researcher Mira Petrovic to improve the classification of the King Saud University of Riyadh on the Shanghai list.
Mira Petrovic works for the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA) and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and is an international benchmark in the analysis of contaminants in water. The scientist, in an interview with the Efe news agency, has acknowledged that about 3 years ago he received an email from a “known” Spanish colleague to initiate contact and who knows of professors who mediate in this type of affairs.
Ensures that in your case “the first email was a bit vagueasking only to talk about a collaboration”. He accepted the invitation because he thought it was about a project “because in Saudi Arabia there are issues that may be of interest”. “They have very advanced desalination technology and it is possible to do research with that country, No one has any doubts about this or calls into question a scientific collaboration”.
In the second email, he was told that they had “a distinguished investigator program.” She gave the ‘OK’ to work with some and asked to know what her responsibilities would be, for which the answer was Just change the name for which she asked for a “proof, of connection to the King Saud University, and, later, we will pay you this”. On the same day she told them “thank you very much” but that with her contract with ICRA and ICREA she is obliged “to affiliate to these institutions.”
Mira Petrovic has been in Spain since 1999, where she initially worked for the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) through the Barcelona Institute of Environmental Chemistry and the Institute for Environmental Diagnosis and Water Studies before making the leap in 2005 to ICREA and to ICRA.
The government’s response
The Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats, has advanced that his department is in contact with the Ministry of Science in order to determine “what is the dimension of the problem”. “We have seen that it affects some specific elements. It is clear that numerical criteria are misused when assessing the quality of teaching”, he pointed out. Subirats has exposed that “a person who does an article every three days is a bit complicated to understand”.
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