Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery?

Dec. 20, 2016
From: “S.B. Krivit”
Sent: Dec 20, 2016 9:47 AM
To: Jeremy Lewis, Marco Fontani, Mary Virginia Orna, Maria Costa, Robert A. Nelson
Subject: Plagiarism in Lost Elements

Dear Jeremy,

I would like to inform you of plagiarism in the book Lost Elements by Marco Fontani, Mariagrazia Costa and Mary Virginia Orna. Text was taken without attribution from Robert Nelson’s book Adept Alchemy.

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/books/2016LH/Lost-ElementsComparison.shtml

Please let me know whether OUP takes any action on this matter.

Steven

Dec. 21, 2016
Subject: RE: Plagiarism in Lost Elements
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:48:21 +0000
From: LEWIS, Jeremy [OUP]
To: S.B. Krivit

Dear Steven,

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’m looking into this now.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Jan. 19, 2017, Update:
On Jan. 6, 2017, Orna, a professor of chemistry at the College of New Rochelle, New York, and member of the executive committee of the American Chemical Society Division of the History of Chemistry, sent a letter to Nelson, on behalf of the author team.

“My co-author, Marco Fontani … found the text of [Nelson’s] book on a Web site and, when he could not locate any reference to an author or source, thought it acceptable to proceed as he did,” Orna wrote. “I concur that this was not acceptable professional and scholarly practice.”

“Orna’s statement that she ‘could not locate any reference to an author or source’ is pure bovine effluvia,” Nelson told New Energy Times. But the plagiarism, he said, is the least of his concerns.

“The prima facie plagiarism is blatant and extensive,” Nelson wrote. “Worse yet is the disgraceful, insidious way in which the authors dismiss the successful experimental results obtained by Wendt and Irion. It adds injury to insult, and it sabotages science.”

According to the Orna letter, Oxford University Press intends to do the following:

1. Dispose of all existing stock of The Lost Elements in its warehouse.
2. Reprint the book with proper quotation marks and attribution to [Nelson’s] work.
3. Correct and reissue the electronic version of the book to include the proper use of quotation marks and attribution to [Nelson’s] work.

The proposed remedy does not address the manner in which the history of chemistry has been misrepresented in the book. A more factual representation of that history has been published in the 2016 Krivit book Lost History.