Dear Drs. Shen and Mandelbaum,

Thank you very much for following up on our complaint. We appreciate the support of both the 
ACM and the IW3C2 in investigating this incident. We had a chance to review and discuss the 
relevant communications and papers (those we could access).

Giuseppe Lo Re sent a similar "explanation/apology" to us as well. Unfortunately, their account is 
neither credible nor relevant. The problem here is not just a missing reference, but the wholesale 
plagiarism of our ideas and papers. In addition to the sentences that were copied verbatim 
(without quotes or acknowledgment), there is no original contribution in all these papers beyond 
what has been plagiarized from various papers of ours.

If this was simply a case of missing reference, quotes would not be missing, and more 
importantly, there would be some original contribution beyond our work. This is not the case. The 
three papers for which they acknowledge the lack of citation (which they label [2], [3] [4]), are not 
only plagiarized from ours, but also self-plagiarized. They all present the same ideas (ours) with 
no original contribution distinguishing them from our papers or from each other.

We attempted to access the other three papers of theirs (which they label [5], [6] [7]) where they 
say that they cite our work, to see if those are honest contributions or further instances of 
plagiarism. Unfortunately, it was impossible to gain access to those papers using the URL, 
username and password sent by Giuseppe Lo Re.

We understand that this is as far as the IW3C2 can proceed; although we do not wish to proceed 
legally for the copyright infringement (at least at this time), it would be nice to know that Springer 
and the other publishers involved have some interest in maintaining the integrity of our research 
community.

Yet the attempt by Lo Re & coauthors to camouflage their blatant plagiarism as lack of a 
reference and attribute it to "the inexperience of a young Ph.D student" (as stated in the note they 
sent us) implies a clear lack of good faith. Therefore, we hope that the ACM will pursue this case 
according to the ACM policy and remove all the plagiarized papers from the ACM digital library, 
replacing them with a notice about the plagiarism incident. We also would very much appreciate it 
if the ACM could notify the publishers of the relevant papers.

Please let us know about the ACM's course of action. Of course we remain at your disposal if 
there is anything we can do at our end. Thank you all again for your support and continued 
assistance!

Filippo Menczer, Le-Shin Wu and Ruj Akavipat


Filippo Menczer