The PLOS story began in 2000 when its founders set out to tackle the lack of access to the majority of scientific research, which was then published behind pay walls. They startled the American academic science establishment with a petition calling for open access to research findings.

The action is being taken under an existing state programme to develop education from 2013-20 and a special plan to improve leading universities, which was approved by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev

The University of Düsseldorf stripped Schavan of her PhD on 5 February. The council of the university’s faculty of philosophy had found that “a considerable amount of texts written by other authors had been adopted word-for-word but had not been correspondingly referred to as citations,” the faculty dean, Bruno Bleckmann, explained.…

. The countries in North Africa are Algeria, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Somalia and Tunisia.

The influential Inter University Student Federation (IUSF) said it had found enough examples to prove inaccuracies in the results, in the standardised score known as the ‘Z-score’ and in student rankings.

Faced with the firepower of French military strikes, the Islamic militants left – but not before damaging the Timbuktu-based Ahmed Baba Institute building, which at one time had been used as a headquarters by the rebels

In an interview published in Le Soleil of Dakar, Diagne described a “radical imbalance between a rapidly growing student population” and “infrastructure to cater for them and a framework for educating them that are not up to this demographic challenge

Schavan announced her resignation after a panel investigating her PhD thesis found she was guilty of “deliberate deception” in using text that was not properly attributed. She said she would take legal action against the university’s decision and that the allegations “have hurt me deeply”.

The general strike against the political assassination of Chokri Belaid is believed to be the biggest since 14 January 2011 – the day former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, touching off the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria

Huge cuts had been expected at the hands of the austerity-minded EU heads of state and government but the deal that emerged late last Friday, 8 February, was by no means all bad

. The scholarship programme, “Building Stronger Universities in Developing Countries”, was launched on 25 February and will support students from selected universities to study in Denmark. It will be run by the ministries of education and foreign affairs, and the rectors’ conference Universities Denmark.

In his opinion to the Court on 7 February, Advocate General of Luxembourg Paolo Mengazzi stated that “financial aid for higher education is granted to citizens of Luxembourg and other EU citizens on the conditions that they are residents in Luxembourg”.

. “Adaptation is no longer about analytical framing: it’s a learning-by-doing process,” said Huq, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

On the basis of the committee’s assessment, which was completed late last year, stakeholders are putting pressure on the government to wake up to its responsibilities and transform public universities into 21st century centres of learning anchored in the knowledge economy.

Universities should be more transparent about what they offer through PhD programmes, to better allow students to compare doctoral studies across Europe, Thomas Jørgensen, author of the recently concluded Accountable Research Environments for Doctoral Education (ARDE) project told University World News in Brussels.