Last post was about discovering your research has been plagiarized in a predatory publisher – today is potential approaches to deal with it.

If your work is published, you need to work with your journal’s editor and publisher to have them take action, especially if you have transferred copyright to them.  They have a duty to protect your copyrighted work and if you remind them of that enough, they will take action, although not nearly as fast as you want them to.

If you have retained copyright (i.e. open access publishing) or your work is still in working paper form, it is up to you to protect your intellectual property.  This means being able to document the fact that the work is yours (e.g., conferences, repositories like SSRN, research grant information, original data etc).

Then it means learning how to protect your creation – that calls for professional advise.  In some universities the Office of Research Services (or whatever your U’s intellectual property office is called) will be ready and able to help you.  In other cases, it means finding an appropriate attorney (i.e. legal counsel) to help you defend your claim.

Now remember, this is all predicated on the paper being plagiarized in a Predatory Publisher – any decent journal will follow COPE’s (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines to deal with allegations of plagiarism.  In latter blog posts I will talk about what “decent” journals do!!!