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Again caught up with allegations of plagiarism: Franziska Giffey
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Christoph Soeder / picture alliance / dpa
Federal Family Minister Franziska Giffey reacted calmly to the publication of the previously kept secret test report that the Free University of Berlin (FU) had prepared for her dissertation.
The trigger had been plagiarism allegations against the doctoral thesis of the SPD politician.
"For me nothing has changed in the current situation," said Giffey in Berlin.
The Free University of Berlin prepared a test report last year after the platform vroniplag.wikia.org found 119 potential plagiarism sites in the minister's doctoral thesis.
Giffey was reprimanded by the FU, but was able to keep her doctorate.
Since then, however, the university had kept the report under lock and key.
The Asta, the student representatives of the FU, surprisingly published the final report at the beginning of the week.
According to its own information, the Asta had received the internal report from the FU at the request of the Freedom of Information Act (IFG).
In the expert opinion, the criticized passages of the dissertation are examined more closely.
The expert commission comes to the conclusion that ultimately only four passages in the text are to be assessed as real plagiarism without mentioning the source.
In addition, there are, however, a number of paraphrases of text passages in which the origin is only given imprecisely or not at all.
more on the subject
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Giffeys doctorate: Plagiarism hunter criticizes lenient decision of the Free University of Berlin
There is, "albeit to a limited extent, the facts of objective deception with conditional intent," it says in the report.
Giffey's work thus contains "considerable deficiencies in terms of the standard of scientific work", but only in a narrowly defined part of the dissertation.
The independent scientific achievement of the work still exists, a complaint is therefore sufficient as a sanction.
However, the Free University of Berlin is currently checking whether this punitive measure could even be imposed.
Because the Berlin University Act does not provide for such a complaint.
The university has therefore commissioned a legal opinion to assess whether the complaint for Giffey was lawful.
"The university has completed the procedure. There is now another test procedure on the procedure," said Franziska Giffey.
That is a matter for the university.
Student representative Janik Besendorf from the Asta, on the other hand, has already made a decision: "The presidium must now decide again and withdraw Giffey's doctorate because the complaint was illegal."
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