A few years ago I got an alert from Google Scholar asking me to confirm ownership of a recently published paper. Given how common my last name is, I got a lot of false matches, and the paper wasn't mine. The title, however, was similar to my undergrad research, so I took a look. Turns out that the paper was a slightly edited plagiarism of my undergrad thesis, on which I'd been credited as second author.
I emailed the first "author", the chair of the department listed as his affiliation, and the editor of the journal. The individual responded, and after some back and forth he claimed that he'd wanted to collaborate with me and had worked on reformatting the paper, but had not meant for it to go to print. The department chair said that they hadn't seen him since he'd graduated a five years previous. The editor said they'd take a look.
Finding that one's work has been plagiarized is frustrating, but dealing with the journal was even more so. They quickly acknowledged that the paper was plagiarism (by running a tool that checks against some corpus--why don't they always do this?) and had me approve a retraction statement. However, it took me sending a DMCA takedown notice and copying the publisher's general counsel on the email to actually get it posted. It then became clear that they had no intention of taking the paper off their website. Their reasoning was that their Code of Ethics precluded them from removing a retracted paper. A couple more emails to the general counsel pointing out that their Code of Ethics did not trump copyright law and a stated intention to seek legal representation finally got things sorted. I'm still not sure whether the plagiarism or the retraction notice went to print--I've been unable to get a hard copy of the journal issue.
I also demanded that the journal send me the referee reports, which they did after some insistence (and me pointing out that I was listed as an author). They also sent the response from the submitter. One of the reviewers was very concerned as to why previously published work was being submitted. In response, the individual moved some paragraphs around and made some claims about focusing on different parts of the research.
The individual later contacted me after the retraction notice started causing some problems for him, hoping that I could somehow make it go away. He admitted that he knowingly submitted the paper. He needed a paper in my area to help him change fields, and included my name because he intended to also include my name on some of his own work to make up for plagiarizing mine. If he hadn't done that he would have gotten away with it :(
I emailed the first "author", the chair of the department listed as his affiliation, and the editor of the journal. The individual responded, and after some back and forth he claimed that he'd wanted to collaborate with me and had worked on reformatting the paper, but had not meant for it to go to print. The department chair said that they hadn't seen him since he'd graduated a five years previous. The editor said they'd take a look.
Finding that one's work has been plagiarized is frustrating, but dealing with the journal was even more so. They quickly acknowledged that the paper was plagiarism (by running a tool that checks against some corpus--why don't they always do this?) and had me approve a retraction statement. However, it took me sending a DMCA takedown notice and copying the publisher's general counsel on the email to actually get it posted. It then became clear that they had no intention of taking the paper off their website. Their reasoning was that their Code of Ethics precluded them from removing a retracted paper. A couple more emails to the general counsel pointing out that their Code of Ethics did not trump copyright law and a stated intention to seek legal representation finally got things sorted. I'm still not sure whether the plagiarism or the retraction notice went to print--I've been unable to get a hard copy of the journal issue.
I also demanded that the journal send me the referee reports, which they did after some insistence (and me pointing out that I was listed as an author). They also sent the response from the submitter. One of the reviewers was very concerned as to why previously published work was being submitted. In response, the individual moved some paragraphs around and made some claims about focusing on different parts of the research.
The individual later contacted me after the retraction notice started causing some problems for him, hoping that I could somehow make it go away. He admitted that he knowingly submitted the paper. He needed a paper in my area to help him change fields, and included my name because he intended to also include my name on some of his own work to make up for plagiarizing mine. If he hadn't done that he would have gotten away with it :(