At 09:58 AM 7/23/2003 -0700, Michael Eisen asked: >Are there statistics on how often and through what means scientific journals >detect and pursue plagiarism? > >These would be very useful to help frame these discussions, as would some >concrete examples that demonstrate the role that copyright plays in these >actions. It seems like you would be in a good position to provide some.
I would like to reply on behalf of a single publisher - the American Physical Society - to the questions concerning copyright and plagiarism. I have stated in the past that we would pursue plagiarists whether or not we had copyright, and that copyright would not play a role in our actions. I have had, as a result of recent experiences, to change my mind on this. We have had a rash of cases brought to our attention where papers in our journals (the Physical Review journals and Reviews of Modern Physics) have been plagiarized in others (and in one case where we published an article that was plagiarized from another journal). The heightened awareness of cases of scientific misconduct has probably led to an increased reporting of such problems. The most difficult thing we had to deal with was getting other journals to face up to the problem and to publish a retraction of the plagiarized article. It was here that we were able to pressure the editors of the other journal with the fact that they were violating our copyright. This quickly got their attention, and retractions were soon forthcoming. We would of course have pursued this on behalf of the authors of the plagiarized article if they had retained copyright. But this wouldn't work if the paper were in the public domain.I can point to three different papers in the past six months where we used copyright as a prod in dealing with other journals. Martin Blume Editor-in-Chief The American Physical Society One Research Road Ridge, NY 11961-9000 USA e-mail: bl...@aps.org phone: 631 591 4036 fax: 631 591 4275