There is another problem connected with plagiarism that has not been
mentioned so far, perhaps because many do not know it exists.  It is
the matter of people making false accusations of plagiarism, which is
one of the reasons that journal editors may be a bit more cautious
about dealing with such accusations than many think they should be.
Clearly charging someone publicly and to their employers is a very
serious matter that can lead to firing and permanent professional
destruction.  There are plagiarists who deserve this, but there are
others who have been falsely accused.

I shall speak in an elliptical way about a case that I know of very 
well, partly because I am now on the "bad" list of the person who is
making the accusations repeatedly and in a very public and widespread
way.  I am on the list because I accepted and published a paper by
one of the people that this individual, who will remain unnamed, has
been falsely accusing of plagiarizing his work.  This "bad" list includes
some editors of other journals, as well as various administrators at
various universities who refused to fire the people being falsely
accused.  Given that most of the people and institutions on this list
are quite respectable, I consider it an honor to be on the list, which
keeps being spread widely and repeatedly.  However, I had to deal
with this personally in the most direct way, as this mailing went to my
superiors at my institution, and I had to defend myself.

So, you might say: why is not somebody doing something about
this?  Why is this individual not being sued or brought to justice with
his own employer (yes, he is male, I will go that far)?  Ah, it is done
through a supposed institution with a very important and ethical
sounding name, which I shall not provide, that is supposedly involved
with ferreting out plagiarism and other academic sins.  However, if
one googles this institution one does not find it.  It does not exist.
And, the only evidence of its existence is the messages it sends out
periodically from different locations to enormous recipient lists (and
has been doing so for some years).  The only case that this supposedly
noble institution seems to be concerned with is this one case, a set of
well known supposed plagiarists who have stolen this idea from this
one not very well known academic, who whenever he is approached
by anybody denies having anything to do with this institution and even
writes letters to anybody who inquires about how he has even tried to
get them to stop their tactics.  If one approaches his dean, this is what
one gets back, that he must be innocent because of these claims.

There are some other pieces of indirect evidence.  It has been 
determined that all of the emailings of this institution from abroad
have come from countries that this anti-plagiarist was visiting at the
time to attend conferences.  Also, he maintains a website on which he
himself makes the claim that he is the inventor of the concept that this
institution claims he was being plagiarized for.  He makes no specific
accusations by name on his website, but he does respond to arguments
that have certainly been brought up to him about the matter.

Thus, when I first got one of these messages and was considering
a paper by one of the accused, I did some checking.   I discovered that
the term he claimed to have invented that these people were supposedly
stealing from him had appeared in print more than 40 times over a period
of 25 years prior to his use of it in print.  I pointed this out.  Sometime
later his website included an argument that although others had used 
the term before him, they were not using it in the correct way that he
was the one to define.  However, without getting into details, this 
is just a plain lie, and others had used it in the way he did and used the
sort of empirical methods that he suggested prior to him.  Total garbage.

I will conclude this by noting that the accused, and those of us on
his naughty list, have decided that the best way to deal with this is
to ignore him and not grant him publicity by exposing him.  It is clear
that what he wants is press coverage, with him as the "aggrieved
little guy" against the "big guys," in which the press would report the
arguments of both sides.  While his arguments would be total baloney,
they would be viewed by the public as "one side versus the other,"
with "maybe there is some truth to the little guy's claims," when there
is none.  So, he is being responded to now with silence, which I am
maintaining, and I can report that fortunately the employers of the
accused have figured out that the accusations are all baloney, although
the accused went through some very difficult times.  This was very
bad, and frankly, this individual deserves to be fired and treated
as badly as the most egregious of really serious plagiarists.  But it
does not look like that will happen.  This person making false
accusations of plagiarism is getting away with it, even if he is not
getting the full satisfaction he clearly wants.

Barkley Rosser