Following a repeated procedure ordered after a ruling by the Administrative Court, the Ethics Committee of Montenegro has once again upheld the proposal submitted by the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) and found that Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aleksandar Stamatović, of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Montenegro (UoM), violated academic integrity through self-plagiarism, namely by publishing the same scientific article in two different international journals.
As a reminder, in March 2025, CCE submitted a proposal to establish a violation of academic integrity after determining that Stamatović had published an identical scientific paper in the journals Transylvanian Review and Bulgarian Historical Review, both indexed in the Web of Science database. After the Ethics Board of the University of Montenegro declared itself incompetent to decide on the matter, the case was referred to the Ethics Committee of Montenegro, which first determined in October 2025 that the case constituted self-plagiarism. That decision was subsequently annulled by the Administrative Court on procedural grounds and remitted for reconsideration.
In the repeated proceedings, the Ethics Committee once again concluded that Stamatović had knowingly reproduced his own text without citing the original source and presented it as an entirely new work, thereby committing self-plagiarism within the meaning of the Law on Academic Integrity. The Committee established that the paper had first been published in December 2023 in the Romanian journal Transylvanian Review, while the identical text was subsequently published in February 2024 in the Bulgarian journal Bulgarian Historical Review, under the affiliation of the UoM.
It is particularly significant that the Ethics Committee rejected one of the key arguments put forward by the defence, namely that no personal benefit had been obtained. In its decision, the Ethics Committee emphasised that, within the academic community, benefit cannot be reduced solely to financial gain. Rather, publishing the same paper in two international journals under different institutional affiliations constitutes an unjustified academic advantage through the artificial inflation of scientific output and the number of bibliographic references, which may also affect promotion to higher academic and scientific ranks. Furthermore, the Ethic Committee found that the technical communication issues with one of the journals, to which Stamatović referred, could not exempt the author from responsibility. On the contrary, it concluded that he was fully aware of the rules of academic publishing and had knowingly submitted the same manuscript to another journal before resolving the status of the first submission.
CCE expects that this second decision, which provides an even more detailed and comprehensive legal reasoning, will constitute an important precedent for the protection of academic integrity in Montenegro, including in cases involving individuals who have for years enjoyed the protection of the UoM’s leadership despite conduct that undermines the UoM’s reputation.
Academic integrity cannot be a matter of discretionary or selective application; it is the foundation of trust in science, higher education, and academic qualifications. We therefore expect this decision to be applied consistently and to send a clear message that the standards of academic ethics must apply equally to everyone, regardless of their position, academic rank, or institutional protection.
Snežana Kaluđerović, Senior Legal Advisor