The offending paper, "A Review on Building Design as a Biomedical System for Preventing COVID-19 Pandemic", was published in April 2022 in a special issue Dirk H. R. Spennemann had edited. But in June of that year, Marco Spada, a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom, informed Buildings the work borrowed heavily from two previous publications without proper citation. Although many sentences had been reworded using synonyms, the plagiarism was extensive and obvious.
According to Spennemann, the journal did not tell him about Spada’s allegations until Oct. 25, 2022. Two days later, however, Spada reached out to Spennemann, providing details of his allegations. Based on an in-depth examination of the plagiarized article and the source papers, Spennemann told us, he found plagiarism had indeed occurred. On Nov. 23, 2022, he recommended "the authors be asked to withdraw/retract their paper within a week or, failing that, that the paper be withdrawn by MDPI Buildings and deleted from the website".
Spennemann said the journal asked five other members of the editorial board for their assessment and on Feb. 20, 2023, informed him it had sent the case to the publisher’s ethics team. Spennemann said he inquired several times over the following months about the case. On Oct. 24, 2023, the journal told him a retraction process had “been initiated but that authors need to concur and that authors are unresponsive.” Spennemann asked to be informed of further developments, he said, but was only formally notified of the retraction on Sept. 10, 2024 – four days after the retraction notice was published on the journal’s website.
