Springer Nature took eleven months to retract a plagiarized book, then made it disappear without a trace

A year ago today, Jennifer Powers, a co-author of a 2009 paper wrote to Springer Nature to alert the publisher to the fact that Tropical Dry Deciduous Forest: Research Trends and Emerging Features, a 2017 textbook by J. S. Singh and R.K. Chaturvedi, had plagiarized her work, and the work of others. A publisher representative responded six days later, saying they would look into the matter.

Then, for five months, crickets.

On January 23 of this year, Powers, of the University of Minnesota, sent another message asking for a progress report. Several days later, a Springer Nature staffer wrote to say they would provide an answer by mid-February.

Mid-February came and went, and the co-author sent another reminder, as did Jesse Lasky, of Penn State, another of the authors who said his work had been plagiarized. Back from Springer came this message:

For now I can tell you that we need to see the entire book for any overlap [with regard to] the original source from where the text has been lifted, if the authors took the required permissions or not, if the source was open access or not, the right credit notes, the extent of text uplifted, verbatim or paraphrased, etc., and see them against COPE guidelines and come to a consensus internally.

And:

Rest assured that this is on our priority and we are working on it. We are as eager as you to conclude it and close this.

Then, on March 26, after yet another reminder, a seeming resolution:

We have decided to retract the book.

Another three months went by, however, still without a retraction. On June 13, a publisher’s representative wrote:

The retraction for this book has already been approved.  We have started the process of retraction. As a part of this process we need to share the decision of retraction with the book author as well.

Meanwhile, Dr Chaturvedi and Dr Singh have communicated their explanation and disagreement to a potential overlap of content or plagiarism. I have shared a draft of retraction note with them and am in discussion with them to get their assent on the retraction.

In another message, a publisher staff member wrote:

Retraction process is a 4 step process and we are now at second [to] last step. In a few weeks the book will be off the Springer platforms.

And it was — on July 13, eight days shy of eleven months after the co-author had called the problems to Springer Nature’s attention.

No notice is … good notice?

The book simply disappeared. Lasky asked whether there would be a retraction notice. An associate editor at Springer Nature told the author:

Hi: there is no retraction note. When the whole book is retracted, we do not publish a note.

A Springer Nature spokesperson confirmed that the book 

…was retracted due to plagiarism. A thorough check of all chapters found many instances of major content overlap, which is why the book has been fully retracted.

But why did the the URL become “page unavailable,” instead of including a retraction notice? A spokesperson told us:

We are working on a standardized workflow for full-book retractions. There are already fully operational chapter retractions in place which follow the same process as journal retractions; entire books, however, require a different procedure because of technical complexities, so there is no retraction note at the present time.

The book remains for sale on Amazon, for more than $100.

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