H. Peter Gumm

Philipps-Universität Marburg

Plagiarism or „naturally given“ ? Decide for yourself …    
 

World Scientific has recently published a book:

                 K. Denecke and S. Wismath: Universal Algebra and Coalgebra,
             World Scientific, 2009

Large portions of this book are unauthorized word-by-word copies from my text

                 Universelle Coalgebra 

which forms an extended appendix to the book

             Th. Ihringer: Allgemeine Algebra - Mit einem Anhang über
             Universelle Coalgebra von H. P. Gumm,
Heldermann Verlag, 2003

The authors did not ask for my permission nor that of the publisher, to use my work. Instead they
claim in their introduction:  „
The material of this book is based on lectures and research seminars
given by the first author and his students at the University of Potsdam (Germany)“
.

Fact is, that practically all of the material on coalgebras, including structure, text, whole paragraphs,
theorems, examples, figures (down to the labelling of objects and arrows) are copies (in English) of
my abovementioned section to Ihringer‘s book.

 Here are some comments from colleagues who were alerted of this case of plagiarism:

"... I have finally found out how to browse through the book
of Denecke and Wismath and I am shocked. The plagiarism is so
obvious that there is no excuse: large parts are simple
word-by-word translations, including notation and the shape
of diagrams, and this could not possibly happen unintentionally! "

" ... I have taken a closer look myself now on the overlap
between Denecke's and your book, and I fully agree that it
is unacceptable."

" ... This is dreadful. [I do not have access to the book itself
 but already a quick glance to its table of contents at amazon
 confirms what you wrote.] You cannot let this pass "

Excerpts of the plagiarism are demonstrated on the following pages, so read on ….