Re: Load balancing

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

Dear Phil,

I think you are conflating a number of different issues. In the case you
have been investigating it is clear that the articles did not go through
the editorial processes of more than one journal. If they had gone through
the normal route the final versions would have been different because
there would be different referees and different copy editors - even if the
original submissions had been identical.

Publishers do not receive articles as the publisher.. Sometimes the office
may be located at the publisher but it is the editor's office and operates
just as it would operate if it is in the institution of the editor. Any
editor of any library journal subscribing to this list will confirm.

The publisher does not come into play until the article is accepted and
sent by the editor into the production process. It is quite possible (and
does happen) for an article in the same or more or less the same form
submitted to a number of journals, which may or may not be published by
the same publisher. This is of course forbidden in instructions to authors
and is not accepted as correct practice by any of theacademic communities
I am familiar with. It can happen that an article can be published in one
journal at more or less the same time as a very similar article (never
completely identical for the reasons which I have mentioned) is published
in another and it can happen that the two journals are published by the
same publisher. I have known this to happen once in recent years to
journals I have some responsibility for.

There are various procedures for drawing attention to this similarity once
it has been discovered (see the NLM site for explanations). Obviously also
the editors of the journals will tell the person concerned not to submit
again. I know of no publisher, who has procedures for stopping such a
duplicate (or almost duplicate) publishing and the reason is quite simple.
To put all articles accepted through the sort of software that is offered
would be costly and create a whole new step in the workflow i.e. cause
some delay.

If the academic community were pressing for publishers to adopt this step,
publishers would have to listen but they do not and are unlikely to do so.
These are rare happenings. They are not the norm. The authors discovered
in this practice are penalised.

If you argue (as I am sure you do not) that publishers are morally obliged
to prevent this happening, i.e. duplication publication because two
different journals have accepted more or less the same article, I can say
little except to point out that libraries regularly buy more than one copy
of different articles, books or even journals because of the different
aggregations they subscribe to. I know some librarians (like Chuck) worry
about this but I cannot see that it is easy to prevent this happening.

To repeat however - this is nothing to do with the publishing practice
which you have exposed.

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Davis" <pmd8@cornell.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 5:21 PM
Subject: Re: Load balancing

> Sally (and other publishers on this list)
>
> Does your organization have mechanisms in place to make sure that articles
> are only considered in one journal at any one time?  And, based on your
> experience as a publisher, what other process controls were set up to
> prevent article duplication?
>
> Chuck has raised a very important issue dealing with process control.
> While I'm sure that no other publisher wants to recreate what I've
> discovered in Emerald/MCB UP, a constructive discussion about what
> publishers can do to prevent a reoccurrence of this phenomenon has been
> missing.  Emerald has publicly apologized for their actions but provide no
> details that things have changed in-house.
>
> --Phil Davis