On December 24th, 2009, we were rather unpleasantly surprised, if not shocked, when we came across with the work by Selvam et al. (2007):
Selvam, M.A.J., Kumar, C., Nibin, T. and Muthuraman, S. 2007 Computational Modeling and Simulation of Heat Transfer Analysis in Plate Heat Exchanger with Different Chevron Angles. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences 2(4): 760-767.
As you can easily realize their work, originally available online at http://www.medwellonline.net/fulltext/jeas/2007/760-767.pdf, (now only as our local copy) was literally a carbon copy of our published work in 2004 on the 1st Intern. Conference "From scientific computing to computational engineering" Athens, Greece, available online here.
As the reader can understand, this is outrageous, it is certainly far beyond deliberate plagiarism, it is simply fraud; the degree of intent is high as all text, figures and tables are copied from the original PDF, the ONLY difference is the authors’ names and affiliation.
We, the co-authors of the paper, tried to contact the authors as well as the journal editor to request that:
the offending paper is removed from the journal
the journal editor should publish an official apology, as the journal also carries responsibility for this incident
the authors of this paper should be punished by their corresponding academic institutions as an example of deliberate plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Nevertheless, until today (July 17th, 2010) no official response nor explanation has been given by either the authors or Medwell Online. Nevertheless, the offending paper was removed and the site no longer references the paper of Selvam et al.
That didn't stop Selvam et al. to resubmit the paper to another journal:
Selvam M. Amala Justus, Kumar P. Senthil, Muthuraman S., 2010. Simulation and Analysis of Efficiency for Variable Chevron angles in Plate heat Exchanger. International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 5(2), Print ISSN : 0973-4562. (Link here)
As this is an open letter to all journals editors and authors, it should be noted that no plagiarism can be effectively hidden nowadays; the arrogant behaviour of Mr. Selvan will eventually be punished.
More information on plagiarism: http://www.plagiarism.org/