Duplicate Publication: A Recent Set of Guidelines

Welcome, AuthorAID colleagues. It’s now a busy time of year here. The semester is ending, the winter holidays are approaching, and there is much to do—including providing a new blog post.

This week’s blog post focuses on a recent set of guidelines on an important subject: duplicate publication.

As you probably know, normally material published in one journal should not also appear in another journal. However, there can be exceptions.

For example, consider the following situation: Some researchers who are non-native speakers of English publish a paper in an international journal. The content would interest readers in the authors’ native country, and so the authors want to publish in a local journal a translation of the paper.

Although it is a form of duplicate publication, such republication in another language is commonly acceptable if

1. The authors obtain permission from the first journal.
2. The authors tell the second journal that their work is a translation of the article in the first journal.   and
3. The translated article clearly states where the original version of the article appeared.

Guidance regarding such situations appears in the recently posted guidelines, which also include links to other resources on duplicate publication. Although the guidelines are from a single publisher (the open-access publisher BioMed Central), much of the content also applies to journals from other publishers.

A link to these guidelines now appears in the AuthorAID Resource Library. I hope that many of you will find these guidelines useful.