- Duplicate publication
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Duplicate publication, multiple publication, or redundant publication refers to publishing the same intellectual material more than once, by the author or publisher. It does not refer to the unauthorized republication by someone else, which constitutes plagiarism, copyright violation, or both.
There are several forms of duplicate publication:
Contents
Copyright violation
Legitimate derivatives
This is deliberate republication in another format, such as the simultaneous publication of a motion picture and a tie-in book. In doing this, it is necessary to respect copyright, for the rights to a derivative of the original work remains with the author of the work, or the publisher or other party to whom the author has assigned the copyright.
Legitimate reformatting
Is another kind of copyright violation.
Self-plagiarism
There are two basic kinds of self-plagiarism, when the similar (or identical) articles appear one by one (republishing) and simultaneously (multiple submission).
Republishing of very similar works
As a research-paper is an implicit claim of furthering knowledge, the researcher must state what exactly is the claim of novelty. This would let the editor rate the article in view of their policy. For example, all/most would reject a paper if already published in another journal, although may tolerate (as IEEE does) a re-edited [and expanded] conference paper.
However, the line is blurred when safety issues are involved. For example, if an author publishes a study which shows that a particular product or design is faulty, then it is important that the information is spread as widely as possible. Such re-publication is justified in the public interest.
Multiple submission to journals
Multiple submission is not plagiarism, but it is considered as serious academic misbehavior. Even when a publication fee is paid, it nonetheless wastes the most important resource in academic publishing: the time and work of the referees and the editors, and contributes to the problem it is intended to solve, the slow speed of editorial review. And there is the unfortunate possibility that more than one journal will accept it. As there is no time for feedback from readers, the same errors appear in various journals.
Defense of multiple submission
Duplicate submission can be defended. The slowness of academic editing is so great that if an author waits until the decision of the first publisher is known, the submission to the second journal may take place a whole year later. (Some Scientific journals, for example, JOSAB, may keep a paper during more than one month to analyzing possible candidates for the reviewing). Yet that is a waste of resource, in the case of those journals which do not get the paper to publish.
A researcher, after obtaining and verifying his extraordinary result, wants to publish it in Physical Review Letters but is afraid that the paper will be rejected, and his competitors will obtain and publish the result earlier. So, the researcher submits the same result to several national scientific journal(s) of low impact factor over the world: 'Proceedings of Springfield University', ' Revista Científica de Guacatelamala', 'Le Courier Scientific de la Republic Democratic Cannibas', 'Научный Бюллетень Myxосранского Технологического Института', 'Journal der Angewandten Chemieinstituts von Kuyzad', 保險海套大学の仕訳 (6 examples of low-impact factor journals, which actually do not exist), and so on.
That is, if 15 journals nod that paper, while only one of them may publish, that is a waste—for 14 of them. Most (all?) journals and popular magazines already tell the potential author not to do that. Alternatively, for an application to the graduate school, the university does not ban that. If that model (request a fee) is/were popular also in the publication field, the "waste of resource" would relate to only the money from out of the pocket of the applicant.
Journal republishing
It occasionally happens that author(s) publishes the same article twice, whether in the same or different journals.
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Exposure of multiple publications
With the advancement of the internet, there are now several tools available to aid in the detection of plagiarism and multiple publications within biomedical literature. One tool developed in 2006 by researchers in Dr. Harold Garner's laboratory at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas is Déjà Vu, an open-access database containing several thousand instances of duplicate publication.
References
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