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Key points Text recycling is the reuse of material from an author's own prior work in a new document.While the ethical aspects of text recycling have received considerable attention, the legal aspects have been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed.Copyright laws and publisher contracts are difficult to interpret and highly variable, making it difficult for authors or editors to know when text recycling in research writing is legal or illegal.We argue that publishers should revise their author contracts to make text recycling explicitly legal as long as authors follow ethics‐based guidelines.
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Text Recycling in Chemistry Research: The Need for Clear and Consistent Guidelines
Like most scientists, chemists frequently have reason to reuse some materials from their own published articles in new ones, especially when producing a series of closely related papers. Text recycling, the reuse of material from one’s own works, has become a source of considerable confusion and frustration for researchers and editors alike. While text recycling does not pose the same level of ethical concern as matters such as data fabrication or plagiarism, it is much more common and complicated. Much of the confusion stems from a lack of clarity and consistency in publisher guidelines and publishing contracts. Matters are even more complicated when manuscripts are coauthored by researchers residing in different countries. This chapter demonstrates the nature of these problems through an analysis of a set of documents from a single publisher, the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS was chosen because it is a leading publisher of chemistry research and because its guidelines and publishing contracts address text recycling in unusual detail. The present analysis takes advantage of this detail to show both the importance of clear, thoughtfully designed text recycling policies and the problems that can arise when publishers fail to bring their various documents into close alignment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737093
- PAR ID:
- 10338117
- Editor(s):
- Schelble, Susan M; Elkins, Kelly M
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Ethics in Chemistry: Developing Common Values across Cultures
- Volume:
- 1401
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 125-134
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/bk-2021-1401.ch008
