The Delisted NSC Academic Ethics Regulations

This article introduces the ‘Academic Ethics Regulations for Researchers’ and its supplementary documents, which were promulgated by the National Science Council (NSC, now the Ministry of Science and Technology) around 2012. The article emphasizes that academic research should be based on high self-regulation to earn societal trust, and notes that China then lacked clear academic ethics regulations. To address this, the NSC provided ‘Seven Explanations’ and ‘Regulations,’ covering researchers’ basic attitudes, data handling, co-author definitions, peer review, conflict of interest avoidance, and explicitly listing improper behaviors (fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, etc.). The article explains that the NSC used ‘misleading, severe’ as criteria for academic misconduct and reviews past cases, most of which involved plagiarism. However, the article concludes by stating that the links to these regulations have since been delisted by the Ministry of Science