[INDOLOGY] pirated essay

[Dipak Bhattacharya]

That is wise. We may recall Nathaniel Hawthorne's complaint against Alexander Dumas. It is painfully human.
DB





On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 10:55 PM, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com> wrote:
 
Dear Rosane, how painful.   I've had similar experiences.


One can write to the culprits, send solicitors' "cease and desist" letters, etc.  But that may not help much, and is troublesome.


Maybe the most elegant way forward is to get an account at http://academia.edu, and put your own copy of your paper there, with suitable framing comments at the top.  You can also mention the pirated copy, together with any disparaging comments you wish to make.  Anybody searching for the topic by keyword will find your copy first, probably, since academia.edu is pretty famous.  But at the least they would find both, and your attached comments would be visible.


See my "Sanskrit Manuscript Collections outside India" paper at Academia.edu for an example of how I dealt with this issue.


Quite a lot of us are putting our non-copyright papers up on Academia.edu these days.  It's becoming a valuable discovery tool for new research publications in one's chosen fields of interest.  I recommend it.

Best,
Dominik




--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Department of South Asia, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies,
University of Vienna,
Spitalgasse 2-4, Courtyard 2, Entrance 2.1
1090 Vienna, Austria
and 
Adjunct Professor, 
Division of Health and Humanities,
St. John's Research Institute, Bangalore, India.
Project | home page | HSSA | PGP






On 11 December 2013 15:50, Rosane Rocher <rrocher at sas.upenn.edu> wrote:

Dear colleagues, 
>
>With thanks to Herman Tull, I just found out that an essay of mine
    was reprinted without my knowledge or mention of the source from
    which it was taken, and, worst of all, with misrepresenting
    changes.  
>
>My original essay "Sanskrit and Related Studies in the United
    States: 1960–1985" was written for, and published in the proceedings
    of, Indological Studies & South Asia Bibliography - a Conference, convened in Calcutta at the National Library of India by its then director, the late great historian Ashin Dasgupta, in which I participated in 1986 (pp. 61–92).  A pirated reprint has since appeared in the volume Sanskrit Studies outside India (On the occasion of 10th World Sanskrit Conference, Bangalore, Jan 3–9, 1997 [which I did not attend]), New Delhi: Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, 1997, edited by the Sansthan's then director, Dr. K.K. Mishra, under the truncated title "Sanskrit Studies in United States" (pp. 97–152).  I do mind the deletion of "and Related Studies," since it was the very point of my essay to assess the state of Sanskrit studies contextually, particularly in connection with area studies, religious studies, and Indo-European linguistics.  Yet worse is the deletion of the period "1960–1985" and passing off the essay as if it was still current 11 years
 later.  I notice that essays about Sanskrit Studies in other parts of the world included in the Sansthan's volume were current, mentioning dates up to 1996.  
>
>Since then, an online version of the Sansthan's volume has appeared,
    which omits the two appendices in my essay (pp. 128–152, equivalent
    to pp. 77–91 of my original essay).  As a consolation, perhaps, the
    online version mercifully also omits the list of contributors to the
    Sansthan's volume (pp. 153–154), in which the 5 half-line entry that
    concerns me manages to feature 4 mistakes: misspelling my name
    "Roscher," misnaming my department "South Asian languages," mauling
    the name of my university as "University of Peninsula," and then
    again the State in which I reside as "Peninsula."  This performance
    brings back to my mind the French phrase with which one of my high
    school teachers greeted anything stupid one of us students had done:
    "Dépêchons-nous d'en rire, de peur d'en pleurer" ("Let's hasten to
    laugh at this, lest it bring us to tears").      
>
>I earnestly request scholars who might be interested in this topic
    to bear in mind the purpose and date of my essay and, if any might
    wish to quote it, to do so with its full, original title, including
    the period covered.  
>
>With thanks and best wishes, 
>
>Rosane Rocher
>Professor Emerita of South Asia Studies 
>University of Pennsylvania 
>Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 
>USA                     
>
> 
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