I wonder if submitting a pre-print to a site such as arXiv could prevent this. At the very least, it'd serve as evidence that the article existed before being republished by the plagiarizer, making the fraud painfully obvious.
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There's also the proof of existence[1]. But none of these really matter because the issue is not proving you were first, it's becoming aware of the plagiarism in the first place. The plagiarists are relying purely on security through obscurity--their cases would fall apart immediately upon discovery anyways.
Now I wonder how many people did this and got away with it.
There's a study¹ that determined the fate of 350 manuscripts rejected by the Annals of Internal Medicine. They found that 69% of them were eventually published in another journal. 70% of those were published in more specialized journals with lower impact factor.
It appears the reviewer took a similar approach. The manuscripts were published between 121 and 1792 days after rejection, with a mean of 552 days. The letter to the plagiarist says the article was published "a few months later" so that would be approximately 90 to 120 days?
This is pretty common in my area (theory / algorithms), but mostly to prove that you were the first to come up with something, in case someone else beats you to the punch while your paper is under review. It also provides open access and the opportunity to go beyond the space limits of conference proceedings (practically all work is published at conferences). This means you can show proofs etc in more detail, or present more detailed experiments, etc.
I really like this way of going about things. Tons of stuff is available to anyone, conferences provide great opportunities to exchange ideas and see what others are working on, and journals don't have the enormous power they enjoy in other disciplines.
I know of a math paper that was plagiarized from the arxiv, and then posted to the arxiv itself. (The math was rewritten but identical. It was also wrong!) One of the authors is a full professor in Germany.
There were many reasons why neither I nor the authors of the original paper pursued this issue.
These services usually have confirmation emails. His emails have timestamps from the moment they were sent into the review process.
Also, his original docs are also time stamped.