Plagiarism of "Encounters with Neighbours"

I feel honoured that my PhD thesis

Norbert Marwan:
Encounters with neighbours - Current developments of concepts based on recurrence plots and their applications,
Universität Potsdam, Germany, May 2003
urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-0000856

seems to be important enough to be plagiarised in shortest time. Where the PhD procedure was even finished in autumn 2003, parts of my PhD thesis were just copied and translated for an Italian PhD thesis without any permission or citation of the source:

Michele Bacchereti:
Sviluppo di modelli non lineari per l'analisi di segnali Elettroencefalografici,
Universita' di Pisa, Italy, February 2004
http://etd.adm.unipi.it/theses/available/etd-02052004-123236/

The Italian thesis was already cited by a scientific article published in the high-level Proceedings of the Royal Society, leading the reader to the wrong imagination, who wrote the review about recurrence plot based concepts:

Richardson N. Leao, Fabricio N. Leao, Bruce Walmsley:
Non-random nature of spontaneous mIPSCs in mouse auditory brainstem neurons revealed by recurrence quantification analysis, Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), 2005
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3258

Comparison

Some parts of both PhD theses are confronted in order to illustrate the plagiarism (look at selected examples, PDF, 4.4MB or more examples, PDF, 7.7MB). These examples are not all of the plagiarised stuff in Bacchereti's thesis. Moreover, the PhD thesis of Marwan is not the only source which was plagiarised, also some other paragraphs and figures were copied or translated verbatim from articles of Faure & Korn (1998) and Gao (1999) without citation.

Actions

November 21, 2005

Email to Bacchereti pointing to the problem, why Bacchereti has not refered to the source of some text in his thesis.

A first (immediate) reply to the query, was that it was simply forgotten (download, PDF, 38KB).

December, 2005 until March, 2006

After a lot of discussions with collegues, professors and experts, I decided to go the soft way. There would be no benefit for anybody if the violation of the copyright would be prosecuted by a court. Moreover, such a procedure would be very difficult or almost impossible even in the Italian system. Therefore, the removing of the plagiarism from the World Wide Web would be (at the moment) the best solution.

March 30, 2006

Email to Bacchereti with the request to remove the online version of his thesis.

April 1, 2006

Bacchereti answered that he has contacted the university in order to remove his thesis from the World Wide Web. On the same day, his thesis was removed from Web.

April 4, 2006

Bacchereti apologised again for his mistake. He confirmed that the university has removed his thesis. He also requested to remove his email address from the corresponding library web site, so that it is more difficult to get a copy of the thesis by email request.