Editors' Virtual Forum: Elsevier Policy on Duplicate Publication

We are interested in finding out editors’ views on the various issues documented in Editors’ Update. We’ve created the Editors' Virtual Forum to enable you to have your say. In each issue, we’ll nominate a topic for discussion and ask you to share your thoughts with other editors.

Elsevier’s duplicate publication policy aims to combat misconduct and prevent unoriginal work from being published. The article discusses Elsevier’s position on this matter. Is duplicate publication, in your experience, a common occurrence or something that happens very rarely? What actions do you take if you discover such violations? When do you believe duplicate publication could be legitimately undertaken? Do you think that Elsevier takes appropriate action?

Please mail your in-depth response to EditorsUpdate@elsevier.com

Reactions will be posted below as well as at the end of the duplicate publication article. Each reply published will display the name and journal of the contributor.

NB: Elsevier reserves the right to edit comments.

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Contributions to Editors' Virtual Forum

3. Joseph P. Campbell, Editor, Digital Signal Processing

I would prefer different wording/policy regarding the growing duplicate publication (including self plagiarism) problem we face. Editors' Update Issue 4 states:

"When an article is accepted by Elsevier, ... to submit original work."

The first sentence appears to define the word "accepted" differently than how authors and editors use it, unless you mean a tracking system other than EES. I think of the word "accepted" to mean that a manuscript submission has been accepted for publication. Is this what is meant by "accepted" or that an article has been 'submitted' to Elsevier for consideration? (This is a critical distinction later in the paragraph.)

(Elsevier - accepted here means accepted for publication)

I would like authors to assure us that this "article [or a likeness] has not been published before and is not being considered for application anywhere else 'at the time of their submission.' I suspect that we cannot enter into a legally binding (or copyright) agreement at the time of submission because the manuscript has not been accepted yet, however, I would like to get as close as possible to that position. At the very least, a statement should appear on the manuscript upload page, 'as we need to do for DSP journal,' and possibly in multiple languages - you wouldn't believe all the excuses we have heard!

We probably need to elaborate on what is meant by "the article" (that's why I added [or a likeness] above). We have had authors claim crazy things! In one case the author made parallel submissions to DSP journal and another one published in Japan - the only difference between the papers were different names for experimental systems and results, the body text was all the same. After collaborating with the other journal, we both rejected the paper, yet this author continues to periodically upload 'new' manuscripts to EES with trivial changes to the paper - arggg! In another case, a submission matched an IEEE journal publication except for the addition of two paragraphs and the addition of another author. The IEEE uses something like an 80% similarity rule to declare two papers to be essentially the same - maybe we should adopt something similar (I realize this is subjective, but it would be very clear to authors that changing the results in a few tables or adding another author is not considered a 'new' submission).

By the way, at the end of the last sentence, I am unsure of what's meant by "...and editors to submit original work." - do you mean to cover the Editorials we, as Editors, write? The same rules should apply, but I hope there haven't been problems with submissions from editors.

2. Karl-Heinz Schwalbe, Co-Editor, Engineering Fracture Mechanics

Duplicate publication happens, however, I have no indication that it is a very common occurrence. Having said that, I must admit that it is not always easy to rank a paper submitted as a duplicate of what was already published elsewhere. It seems to happen very rarely (at least to my limited experience) that an author tries to submit manuscripts that are identical word by word. If it happens that a referee or myself find out such a case, the paper is, of course, rejected. More frequently, authors "modify" manuscripts by adding new diagrams, experimental or theoretical results etc. Here I see a grey zone because it may - in some cases - be justified that a paper builds on a previous one which is closely related. However, proper reference has to be made and overlap has to be restricted.

I see another two types of duplicate publication:

A conference paper with limited length is published in proceedings and a paper dealing with the same subject is prepared for publication in a journal. In that case I would recommend the authors to be honest and attach the proceedings paper to the full paper; I am sure that in such a case a referee would appreciate this when making up his or her mind on the paper.

A second case happens in non-English speaking countries: If an author does application oriented work, then publication in renowned international journals is not sufficient. Knowledge of English is not always widespread, in particular in industry, in spite of globalisation. In that case the author’s - and the institute’s – work must be made available in the local language. In that case we should be generous, again with proper reference to the previous publication and with official copyright agreement.

1. Jean-Michel Kauffmann, Editor, Talanta

– Duplication has seldom been noticed (3 or 4 papers in 8 years). Yet thanks to the power of e.g. ScienceDirect search facilities, editors can now more easily track duplication of paper.

– Our attitude is to condemn immediately this attitude by sending a strong letter to the author with a copy of this letter to editors of major journals in the field (with a copy to Elsevier as well).

– If no convincing reply is provided by the author, we put this author on our black list.

– Duplication of a paper published in another language than English (e.g. Chinese) is still a matter of debate and is quasi impossible for the editor to identify.

– Elsevier should send an additional letter to the author condemning his unfair attitude and informing that Elsevier may take stronger actions (e.g. saying that the author is not allowed anymore to publish his work in any of Elsevier’s journals) if such an attitude is to be continued by the author.

PS: In all our contacts with authors Elsevier should clearly mention the fact that "the submitted article must be an original work and that it has not been sent or published elsewhere".