Still confused (RE: Covert Article Republishing Discovered in Emerald/MCB UP 1989-2003)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

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

I remain confused.  I can't figure out how a journal editor could
republish a previously-published paper unknowingly, unless the author of
the paper re-submitted it without revealing that it had already been
published elsewhere.  While I'm sure that might happen once in a while,
that doesn't seem to be what was happening at Emerald between 1989 and
2001.  By its own admission, Emerald was deliberately republishing
articles that had previously been printed in other Emerald journals.  How
could it do so without the second journal editor's knowledge?  If the
editor is actually an editor, then he plays a central role in putting
together the contents of each journal issue -- in which case he must know
which articles were submitted by authors and handled according to the
usual procedure.  Articles that Emerald wanted to republish were,
presumably, not submitted by authors at all, but either supplied by the
publisher in some way or deliberately taken from other journals' backfiles
by the editor himself.  Either way, the editor had to know what was going
on (or at least that _something_ was going on).

I would welcome correction on this point -- I may be missing something 
fundamental.  But I really can't figure out how a publisher could put a 
bunch of previously-published articles into a journal issue without that 
journal's editor figuring out that something was up.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu