Areas of reforming the statutory regulation of academic integrity in Ukraine

Abstract

Academic integrity is the most important requirement for scientific research. However, the legal regulation of relations ensuring the academic integrity in scientific and educational activities is fragmented and does not contain effective mechanisms for influencing the violator of academic integrity. This necessitates a doctrinal study of the category “academic plagiarism” and the development of areas for reforming the current legislation in this field. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyse the statutory regulation of academic integrity as a phenomenon, the concept of academic plagiarism, its differences from plagiarism in the context of copyright compliance, to identify the scope of subjects responsible for establishing the facts of violations of academic integrity and their powers in the field of responding to corresponding violations, procedures for bringing to justice in case of violation of academic integrity. The present study, based both on general (historical, comparative, logical, and system) and special (structural-functional, formal legal, sociological, statistical, etc.) methods analyses the prospects of statutory regulation of the relatively new concept in Ukraine, which is academic plagiarism, including the legislative norms concerning the establishment of the concept of academic integrity, types of violations of academic integrity, procedures for considering issues of possible violations of academic integrity, types of responsibility for violations of academic integrity and bodies that have the right to apply them, verifies their compliance with international standards. The paper analyses the practice of the National Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education of Ukraine both on the consideration of complaints about violations of academic integrity, and within the framework of accreditation of educational programmes. Attention is drawn to the contradictions of current legal provisions in the legislation of Ukraine in the field of academic integrity. Proposals to the current legislation are formulated to optimise the legal regulation of the issue of compliance with academic integrity. The authors express their opinion on the necessity of accumulating legal regulation of academic integrity within the framework of a single law “On Academic Integrity” to define higher education institutions and scientific institutions as the main subject of ensuring compliance with the principles of academic integrity, and the National Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education – mainly by the appellate instance regarding decisions of higher education institutions on violations of academic integrity; adjusting the list of violations of academic integrity and specifying the procedure for their establishment and stimulating higher education institutions to real and not formal compliance with the principles of academic integrity