Mass fraud and selfplagiarizing by VU-professor
A new scandal concerning fraud in publications has hit the fan. Mart Bax, retired professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), has actually managed to make fraud-of-the-year Diederik Stapel pale in comparison.
Bax spent 15 years making up at least 64 publications, recycling 92 and lying about his resume, accomplishments and prestigious fellowships. The only reason that the VU is not taking any legal action is because the person in question had not been employed there since 2002.
The rumors about this fraudulent professor already started in 2002 but things didn’t escalate until author Frank van Kolfschooten dedicated an entire chapter to Bax’ lies in his 2012 book ‘Ontspoorde Wetenschap’. It still took until march this year for the VU to start an investigation into the wasps nest that was Bax. Committee Baud, who took up the investigation, thought this took way too long. “The committee is under the impressions that the Board of Directors did not give this case, for whichever reasons they had, the attention it deserved. These kinds of allegations, even if they concern someone that is no longer employed at the University, result in a lot of unrest in the concerning departments, the field and even the university itself.
Bax was found to be, among other things, guilty of fraud. The committee was brutal in their conclusions: ” An important part of the publications that were made under Bax’ name, as put forward in official documents, are non-existent. The articles suggest that Bax was still active in the scientific field up until 2002, even though his last original article dated back to 1995. He also claimed to have received numerous awards, important assignments and promotions which he never actually received.” Bax, for instance, claimed to be a ‘fellow’ at Princeton and Cornell. The reports have shown that this was never the case. His honorary membership of the Kroatian Convention of Anthropologists and Ethnologists is entirely made up, the whole organisation doesn’t even exist. Bax, however, claims to be innocent: he says the information on his resume was not his. Bax also selfplagiarized: he recycled his own articles. He changed the abstract, summary or the table of contents to make an article look like it was new, even though it was entirely based on old work.
Read the entire report here. The report named ‘Draaien om de werkelijkheid – Rapport over het antropologisch werk van prof. em. M.M.G. Bax’ is in Dutch, however.
