Jun 10
17
It is unfortunate but we have pulled the book Beyond the Third Eye by Rochelle Moore from publication. After hearing complaints from readers we put the book through a plagiarism scanner and it produced a rating of 25%. According to the software manufacture, any rating above 21% is highly suspect of plagiarism.
We conducted a random inspection of several passages the software identified as suspect and found word-for-word duplication from works that predated the book. No attribution was given for these passages. The duplicated material varied in length from several sentences to multiple paragraphs.
This is truly unfortunate and will force us to change how we handle new manuscripts. In the past our authors sign a publishing agreement that states:
“a) Author warrants that Author is the author and sole owner of the Work or was assigned the rights delineated above; that it is original and contains no matter unlawful in its content, nor does it violate the rights of any third party including but not limited to rights of privacy, rights of publicity, libel or infringement of copyright or any other rights; that the Work is not in the public domain. Author also warrants that these rights are owned or controlled by him without encumbrance and that Author has full power to grant the listed rights to Publisher.”
We worked from a position of “Good Faith” that the authors were who and what they claim they are and had the rights to the work they presented as original. Now we will have to put every manuscript to the test. Thankfully modern technology has provided us a way to scan and compare against other digital works, it does however limit us to only digital comparisons.
We’ve had several people ask why didn’t we vet our authors better. Vetting in the publishing world is fact checking and fact checking is so time consuming that even local newspaper forgo this and expect the authors/writers to check their own facts. This is the case with large publishing houses as well.
A recent article in The New York Times tells the problems that befell Henry Holt & Company recently. Not only did the author make up facts in the book but embellished his own credentials. And an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review revealed that the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson was discovered to have plagiarized his new book Free.
This was a sad week at Andborough Publishing. Our apologies.
[...] 18, 2010 by cymraes This just in from Andborough Publishing reproduced here in [...]
I’m glad to hear Ms. Moore is being brought to task for her plagiarism, and am so so sorry the Andborough’s have gotten caught in the midst of it.
I feel sorry for Ms. Moore. It is taken on faith from a piece of software that she is guilty – with no converse between your company and she first. Just pull the book because the computer tells us so. All Hail the mighty hand of technology for it can never be wrong. What a load of ….
True story time. I live in Lewiston Maine and about 1995 our newspaper office switched to a computerized spell/grammar check and let go of the human checkers because it was felt that the computer was “faster, better and more efficient.” Guess what has happened people??? They have since fired the computer because it stunk. Nothing is as good as the human element. Further, I would argue that much like any other religious/spiritual text Ms. Moore would be hard pressed not to use others works in her own. One could hardly write a Chritian based text w/out using other works. Maybe you should have read her attached Resource sheets to see to whom she gave credit before allowing a computer to make decisions for you!
I guess you didn’t read the article you are commenting on…
We took nothing on “faith” and did research before removing the book. The Resources sheets are not a Bibliography and are not proper attribution for directly quoted material.