Srinubabu Gedela, the owner of India-based OMICS Publishing Group, authored a chapter in the book Bioinformatics for Omics Data: Methods and Protocols, published by Springer under its imprint Humana Press in 2011. But there’s a problem with his text. The chapter contains unattributed text that originally appeared in earlier publications. The amount of unoriginal text is significant, I think. Most of it appears towards the end of the chapter, suggesting that the text was copied in the rush to meet a deadline.
Through his lawyers, Gedela recently announced his intention to sue me for one billion dollars.
Two paragraphs in Gedela’s chapter match text from the Wikipedia article Grid resource allocation manager. The text in the Wikipedia article pre-dates the 2011 publication of the book chapter, and there is no evidence that Gedela authored the Wikipedia text in question. What kind of scholar copies from Wikipedia without citing the source?
Other portions of text in the Gedela article first appeared in two scholarly journal articles and on one website.
Also, there is a figure in the Gedela article that closely resembles a figure in one of the journal articles. I don’t think the image was copied from the earlier article. Both articles describe the same open-source software, and the image was created using the software in both cases. However, the article that contains the first instance of the figure also contains text that later appears in the Gedela piece, suggesting that Gedela may have gotten the idea for the figure from the earlier work.
I have prepared a two-column analysis of Gedela’s chapter, showing his text on the left along with the previously-published, original text on the right. I will also include a scan of the Gedela article in question.
If i these textual appropriations are confirmed as plagiarism, I think they might ethically disqualify Gedela from serving as a scholarly publisher.
