Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology issued a national research-integrity framework on May 25, 2026. The framework adds permanent bans from scientific work to the catalog of sanctions for fabrication and plagiarism. The Retraction Watch database already lists 251 retractions carrying a Vietnamese institutional address. The framework, as Retraction Watch reports it, does not describe a public register of who the new sanctions will apply to.

The shape of the conduct the rules are responding to is on the public record. A Tunisian engineer named Iskander Tlili, staff at Majmaah University in Saudi Arabia, accumulated 171 papers listing Ton Duc Thang University as his affiliation from 2018 forward, and another 49 listing Duy Tan University. In one eight-month stretch in late 2020, the count was 111 papers under the Ton Duc Thang banner and 48 under Duy Tan. Neither university’s staff list included him.

The scheme around those numbers was documented by the Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien in 2020. Thanh Nien reported that Ton Duc Thang and Duy Tan had paid foreign authors substantial sums to falsely list institutional affiliations, a practice the paper found had run for more than a decade. The output bought the rankings. The rankings bought the prestige. Two years later, Vietnam’s own Ministry of Education and Training reported that roughly 70 percent of publications affiliated with Ton Duc Thang involved researchers from outside the university. That figure is not a statistical artifact. It is a description of how the publishing operation worked.

The May 25 framework moves the response from voluntary principle to written rule. Permanent bans from scientific projects. Return of research funding. Suspension from roles. Written warnings and public apologies. Four categories are designated “most serious”: fabricating data, plagiarism, concealing conflicts of interest, and acts distorting the nature of research. Inappropriate use of artificial intelligence is added to the prohibited list, with specific reference to fabricated AI-generated data, images, and references. Institutions are required to run plagiarism checks before submission, retain raw data and drafts, and disclose funding, conflicts, and AI scope. Violations are to be recorded in a government system, the National Digital Platform for Science, Technology, and Innovation Management.

Vietnam had penalties for research misconduct before. What the May 25 framework changes, Retraction Watch reports, is the level of detail, the addition of a lifetime ban as an available sanction, and what Tu Van Duong, a senior researcher at Purdue University and founder of a 300,000-member Vietnamese scientific-integrity Facebook group, calls the move from “general principles and voluntary encouragement” to “concrete mandates” and “binding obligation.”

Van Duong called the framework an “important milestone.” He also said this, in the same interview: “I am not sure which is worse: having no regulations at all, or having regulations that are not respected and properly enforced.” He noted that earlier Vietnamese frameworks lacked “strong enforcement mechanisms” and warned that the new one risks “merely existing on paper.” Daniel Barr, principal research integrity advisor at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, offered that it is “a good thing for governments to promote the importance of integrity in research via policy and to set clear expectations.” Neither said the framework would stop the practice it describes.

The Tlili pattern is not isolated. The Retraction Watch database includes bulk retractions of papers with Vietnamese affiliations across multiple journals, among them Soft Computing, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, and several former Hindawi titles. In 2022, investigators tied Vietnamese researchers to a large Russian paper-mill operation that placed the country among the top ten purchasers of articles from that mill. A group of Vietnamese physicists collected seven retractions for plagiarism. An asthma study was retracted on ethics grounds. None of these came down because of the framework, because the framework did not exist.

The international comparison is consistent in one direction. Scotland in May 2026 required universities to demonstrate robust integrity systems and report investigation outcomes. Peru in March 2026 barred public-university research faculty from special bonuses if they have a retraction in the past three years. India’s Anusandhan National Research Foundation requires advanced-grant applicants to disclose retractions from the past five years. Thailand stood up a national Research Integrity Network. Governments are writing integrity rules at a faster pace than they are making the names of the people the rules cover public. None of these summaries, as reported, describes an open register of sanctioned individuals.

The 251 Vietnamese retractions are sitting in a database that anyone with a browser can query. Retraction Watch built it. The government’s new logging platform, the ranking data, the funding allocations, and the names of the foreign authors who supplied the affiliations sit elsewhere, in institutional and government systems that do not open to the public. The Ministry of Science and Technology has named a sanction. It has not, on the public record, named anyone it will apply the sanction to first. Ton Duc Thang and Duy Tan are still standing. The rankings they bought were never reversed in public view. The accountability the framework promises now runs through a register the public cannot see.

Sources

  1. Retraction Watch – Vietnam researchers face bans and funding cuts for violating integrity rules (2026)
  2. Retraction Watch – Meet the founder of a 100,000-strong Facebook group driving change in scientific integrity in Vietnam (2024)
  3. Retraction Watch – Highly cited engineer offers guaranteed publication, citations in return for coauthorship (2024)