The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.
The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.
On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:
I wanted to let you know that we investigated the plagiarism claim and found that many large sections throughout the book were taken from Wikipedia or similar sources, as you indicated. We are in the process of making the book unavailable on all of our platforms and withdrawing it for sale from all of our resellers.
Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention, and so quickly, so that we could remove it right away.
The book has now been retracted. Each chapter has been replaced with this notice:
This chapter has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Retraction (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This chapter has been removed due to a reported plagiarism issue regarding some of the material, and has been removed with full knowledge of the authors.
First author J. Theo Kloprogge, of the University of Queensland and the University of the Philippines Visayas, declined to comment other than to tell Retraction Watch that “it is too painful what happened to talk about. And we do agree with the retraction at this point in time, though we may publish an updated version in the future.”
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I bet Elsevier is not giving any refunds though.
And I bet they aren’t going to use their ill gotten gains to get iThenticate.
Royalties to Wikipedia might be more appropriate than refunds.
Elsevier have iThenticate. That is what makes this all so ludicrous… could have been nipped in the bud before the publication.
But that is the problem: iThenticate only have one version of Wikipedia, which is constantly changing. They find some, but not all Wikipedia copies. The more is changed, the less is found.
A donation to Wikipedia is definitely warranted.
Look at the bright side: The descendants of anyone who owns a printed copy of this book could make a hefty sum by selling it on Ebay in the year 2121.
I mean, they do not even scan for plagiarism the stuff they publish? What are they for? Just to get money, it seems, usually having honest authors working almost for free..
Maybe it’s time for Wikipedia to publish books.
Wikipedia does publish books, and using Wikipedia’s tools, one can quickly create chapters and articles replete. Its pretty slick.
Wonder if the book authors were also authors of the wikipedia pages? I’ve noticed that senior people in my field who have created highly informative public web servers sometimes publish some of the same verbiage in review articles, and I’m not sure how to think about that.
On one hand, there must be copyright issues, and its double-dipping in terms of “productivity credit” but on the other hand, a review article is a more lasting document than a set of web pages that may not survive the author’s retirement.
Interesting situation. In the service of full transparency, authors who reuse their written material from Wikipedia or elsewhere should disclose such reuse with their readers. A simple author note describing the nature of the reuse ought to be sufficient.
no, they are not the authors. They took, but never gave.
There is a further Elsevier book which plagiarizes a Wikipedia page. It concerns the book “Derivative with a New Parameter” by Abdon Atangana https://www.elsevier.com/books/derivative-with-a-new-parameter/atangana/978-0-08-100644-3 in which several pages (from 127 to 136) are the same from the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease
The text is just copied-and-pasted, pictures included, with no changes. This case is discussed in https://pubpeer.com/publications/11CB6799DE251DE4823C5B434FCD2D where the author provides quite strange answers.
I informed Elsevier of this plagiarism, but they didn’t react.
The author of the book is known to RetractionWatch readers for some of his retracted papers http://retractionwatch.com/2021/02/03/mathematician-ranked-as-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-has-third-paper-retracted/
The book in an enormous 180 mbyte PDF form is still on Library Genesis for those who might be curious.
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=E360C4F2A40A3C3A4C8848B8A6C0F362