Nature reports that the journal "Engineering with Computers" is retracting the paper completely.
The funny thing is that now there is a reply by the coauthor of the paper trying to claim that no such plagiarism exists. Besides the fact that reporting verbatim words and graphs of other people without appropriate quotation marks for text and appropriate copyrights and referencing at the bottom of each picture is per se the definition of plagiarism (note that you can even self-plagiarize-use sentences you have used in your own previous publications-, and this is something I continuously warn my students about!), the points of the coauthor rather than presenting logical points, border on the ridiculous and childish.
Here is a summary of why he thinks everything is fine:
1) first he doesn't know what kind of weblog is "Nature Blog" and/or if it has scientific credit (dude, besides the fact that it does has scientific credit, it doesn't matter who makes the allegations when they are true. It is the same as asking the rape victim if he/she has a doctoral degree in medicine to claim he/she has been really raped!)
2) Because the paper was published in an ISI credited journal such as Engineering with Computers, one can not dispute that it has scientific merit.
(you can not confuse scientific merit with plagiarism. In fact the paper by the Korean authors in 2002 and 2003 have plenty of scientific credit! the problem is that you basically copied most of those papers. Remember, copying verbatim other people's words is PLAGIARISM!)
3) The work of the Koreans is referenced in this paper, so all is good. (no, all is not good. Remember the verbatim thing?!?! If you report verbatim you have not only to report it in quotation marks but refer appropriately at the end of each such sentence the authors/papers. Meaning that your paper should reference a dozen times or so to the Korean paper)
He then tries to show the different scientific points different between his and the Korean paper (not even different enough to be relevant), before accusing Nature of defamation against Engineering with Computers. To tell the truth Nature has all rights, if it wanted to, to ridicule the other journal. If they indeed ask for 4 reviewers to judge the paper and none of them caught this, it means two things:
a) their reviewers are not experts in the field;
b) they do not do their job appropriately.
Shame on Daneshjou as advisor and corresponding author, shame on the student that after all this thinks all is fine, and shame on the university where one is a professor and the other has received a doctoral degree from!
PS. I am an active reviewer for more than half a dozen ISI journals and an associate editor for another, and I have rejected multiple papers till now for self-plagiarism. As a rule of thumb, the authors of papers with proven plagiarism are banned for life on publication in that journal.
