RE: Covert Article Republishing Discovered in Emerald/MCB UP 1989-2003

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Rick and others,

Based on my investigation, the authors reported that they did not resubmit
their articles to another Emerald/MCB UP journal but had received a
request from the publisher for permission to republish.  Did the academic
editors know?  In many cases that I could document, they did not.  If they
DID know and had followed editorial policy -- which was to peer review
each submission -- we would have seen slightly different articles being
published.  But we didn't.  In all of the 409 examples I discovered, the
two (or three) republished articles were verbatim copies (save some copy
editing and reformatting).  One editor of a management journal stated (on
condition of anonymity), "I can categorically state that when I was the
editor I was not aware of any such practice, and would neither condone nor
practice such republication."

To answer your question, it appears that editors (at least in some
documented cases) did not know of the duplicate republishing.

--Phil Davis

At 08:55 PM 11/8/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>One quick question about this potentially explosive revelation:
>
> > In several cases, neither the editor nor editorial board members had
> > knowledge of this practice.
>
>I'm having a hard time figuring out how an editor could unknowingly
>republish a previously-published article, unless the author submitted it
>without revealing that it had previously been published in another
>journal.  Is that what seems to have happened in this case?
>
>----
>Rick Anderson
>rickand@unr.edu