Previously Published Material

Abstract

With the development of Institutional and Subject Repositories and new services such as the F1000 proposal to “publish” posters from meetings, editors are being asked more frequently by authors for clarification on what constitutes prior publication. In other cases they are receiving, without any such request, submissions which are not materially different from versions that have been publicly available on the Internet. This is not new. Physics journals were faced with the same issue over 10 years ago with the launch of the arXiv preprint server. After initial caution, most editors now routinely consider papers that have been available as preprints in this service. In economics, working papers may also have been accessible online before submission for formal publication. There are, however, clear cultural differences between disciplines. In the life sciences, chemistry and medicine, editors have only considered original previously unpublished work for publication. There is a question mark, therefore, over submitted papers that have previously appeared on repositories as reports. Where there is no material difference between the two versions, the journal could be open to the charge of dual publication. A journal might also be open to this charge if it were to publish a paper that reports the same findings and conclusions presented in a poster selected for publication by the proposed F1000 service or similar ventures. A clear citation of any earlier version should help to overcome any inference of dual publication. One way of differentiating between previously posted material and previously published material is to consider whether the material has undergone the process of peer review. This test can be helpful. With preprints, reports, theses, and protocols for clinical trials (e.g. clinicaltrials.gov) the material has not usually been peer reviewed. Even if a report is not changed as a result of peer review, in its published article form it has acquired new status as a result of being checked and selected through peer review. On the other hand, work that appeared as a poster and was selected for the proposed F1000 Service could be deemed to have gone through some form of peer review and, therefore, has already been published. Already some Editors have told F1000 that articles based on posters included in their new service will not be considered for publication. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) cover this in its ethical principles: ‘An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same findings in more than one journal of primary publication.‘ This would appear to rule out a preprint, report or thesis in a repository as a prior publication. A useful source of advice on redundant (or duplicate) publication and acceptable secondary publication is the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) site www.icmje.org/publishing_4overlap.html Adapted and reproduced with permission from Wiley-Blackwell Bob Campbell, Senior Publisher, Wiley-Blackwell