Specifically, in my plugin, I had this: https://github.com/chunky/gephi_graphviz/blob/master/nbproject/project.properties Which included this line: `nbm.module.author=Gary "ChunkyKs" Briggs <chunky@icculus.org>` This caused the angle-brackets to end up nested in some other XML in the generated POM file, which maven took umbrage with. To reproduce: 1) Fork, clone, gephi-plugins 2) Clone https://github.com/chunky/gephi_graphviz into top-level working directory of new gephi-plugins 2a) I then deleted .git from inside gephi_graphviz clone, although I don't know if that matters 3) Run mvn org.gephi:gephi-maven-plugin:migrate Manually editing the project.properties file to not include angle-brackets on my email fixed it