Melville House Books

Plagiarism

• Plagiarism Education Week fails other moral tests

  This week is Plagiarism Education Week, an admirable idea, and certainly useful after the past year, which saw a number of high profile plagiarism scandals—in fact, so many that Jonathan… Read more »

• That’s why they call it a trend

  Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and recently minted (he bought it) publisher of The New Republic, made headlines this weekend when he introduced TNR’s redesign. Now sporting a revamped website… Read more »

• The problem with lifting from press releases

  Early Monday, a fake press release was released on PRWeb, causing many websites, including The Associated Press, to run an incorrect article about Google making a $400 million acquisition of… Read more »

• Plagiarism claims dog this year’s Guadalajara Book Prize winner

  It’s been oh, a month or two, since the last big plagiarism scandal broke — though Jonah Lehrer’s banality always seemed like more of a problem than his self-plagiarism —… Read more »

• Should publishers wipe the slate clean?

  In a year when so many writers’ reputations have been eviscerated by plagiarism and fabrication scandals, it’s interesting to consider the ways these mistakes are treated by publishers, now that ebooks,… Read more »

• How journalists and press releases rewrite science

  The Jonah Lehrer debacle needs no further comment here, but one interesting feature of Charles Seife’s deconstruction and evisceration of Lehrer’s Wired blog on Slate was what he called “press-release plagiarism.” Seife… Read more »

• Like Jonah Lehrer in leather pants

  As reported in Billboard, Rolling Stone, BoingBoing and elsewhere, venerable rock group Def Leppard are returning to the studio to re-record many of their earlier classics note for note. The… 1 / Read more »

• Smut, Amazon, and the biggest plagiarism problem of them all

  Amazon’s publishing services have been touted for how easy they are to use. Much has been made of the story about writers bringing to market works while not having to… 2 / Read more »

• “Delusional” St. Martin’s says passages and scenes from 1956 novel that reappeared in Lenore Hart’s new novel are not, er, plagiarised

  St. Martin’s Press has announced that, despite the fact that much of the language of her book and several concocted scenes first appeared verbatim in someone else’s book, Lenore Hart… 5 / Read more »

• Poll: Should plagiarist Quentin Rowan write a book about his crimes?

  Last week, Quentin Rowan, the disgraced serial plagiarist whose spy novel Assassin of Secrets proved to be massively plagiarized from dozens of other sources, wrote an essay at The Fix comparing… 4 / Read more »