Pinky Pinky, Hanky Panky

That pink regions in the pic show the self-plagiarzed portions in just two pages (pages 4 and 5) of a paper published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) by Ron Breslow, an ex-President of ACS.

The picture is from Stuart Cantrill, who has posted two more: Page 1 and Page 2 and 3.

Nature News Blog has a good summary of this fiasco, which has led to calls for the paper's retraction. [See also Rahul's post].

JACS has temporarily removed the paper from its website "due to possible copyright concerns"; the notice at the paper's web URL adds, "The Journal’s Editor is following established procedure to determine whether a violation of ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research has occurred.”

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Breslow is also a co-author of two JACS papers (published in 1989 and 1990) that were so sloppy and so riddled with basic errors that they cried out for retraction or correction. Two brave souls tried, through independent efforts, to get JACS editors to publish their Scientific Comment on the two papers. Read their tale in Nature (1992) [paywalled, unfortunately].

Breslow became President of ACS in 1996.

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Thanks to Pradeepkumar for the e-mail alert with links to the Nature News Blog and the 1992 paper.