Re: [SCHOLCOMM] what is considered published?

[Gordon, Larissa]

I'd like to as a follow up question to this post, based on a question  asked of me by a faculty member. 

Just what is considered "published" and not published,  and where  do IR's fit in that scheme. Is there even a universal definition to this? How does it vary by discipline....This is to address a concern that students posting a repository will be unable to submit work to a journal in the future.

Thanks for any feedback,

-larissa

Larissa Gordon, MS-LIS, MEd.
Assistant Professor
Reference, Instruction, &,

Scholarly Communication Librarian

Arcadia University
Landman Library
215-572-2136
www.arcadia.edu

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 6:12 PM, "Virginia Barbour, Executive Director, AOASG" <scho...@lists.ala.org> wrote:

Hi Jen - this document from COPE might be of help - this issue has come upa number of time and so we at COPE drafted  drafted guidelines on this. (I was the Chair of COPE until earlier this year)

https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/best_practice_for_issues_around_theses_publishing%20%281%29.pdf

Best wishes

Ginny

Dr Virginia Barbour
Director, Australasian Open Access Strategy Group - AOASG
Brisbane, Australia
ORCID : 0000-0002-2358-2440

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On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 3:07 AM, "Waller, Jen" <scho...@lists.ala.org> wrote:

Hello all,

I am purposefully cross-posting in hopes of receiving a quick, knowledgeable response.

One of our former faculty members and former graduate students submitted a manuscript to a journal, and the journal’s plagiarism detection software picked up a partial match with the former graduate student’s openly available dissertation in our institutional repository.

The journal now needs a letter indicating the dissertation is unpublished. Our questions are:

• Does anyone here have experience with this?
• If so, does anyone here have verbiage or a template letter we could use?
• If so, do these letters generally come from the Libraries? Or the Graduate College? Or both? Or another entity entirely?

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Best Regards,

Jen

-- 

Jen Waller

Open Educational Resources & Scholarly Communication Coordinator

University of Oklahoma

Bizzell Memorial Library

401 W. Brooks St., Room 243

Norman, OK 73019

405.325.7998

jenw...@ou.edu

 

[Laura Quilter]

The COPE guidelines seem very helpful, in the audience they're intended for -- 

presumably academic peer reviewers, or perhaps the publishing industry? 

BUT -- there are other audiences and other needs to consider. 

From my perspective, "published" is a term of art, and varies depending on the 

discipline and context. What constitutes "publication" varies depending on whether

you're considering patent, copyright, defamation, publishing-as-business, or

publishing-as-academic endeavor. Indeed, individual presses and journals might 

have their own definitions of what constitutes "published", for their own purposes. 

I urge scholars to pay careful attention to the standards in their field, including 

the presses or journals of highest interest to them, and if there are patent 

considerations, to consider those questions as well. If someone is trying to apply

those standards -- for instance, if I'm talking to a journal editor, trying to decide 

what their standards should be -- I try to get them to think about the particular 

use cases in their field. Conferences? White papers? Blog posts? Pre-prints 

and working papers series? What's the value of the journal in that field, and 

what role do these other outlets play? 

I would not advise trying to come up with a universal definition of "published" -- 

it wouldn't accurately capture the varying ways the term is used, and it wouldn't 

meet the needs of those that use the term in those varying ways. 

Laura

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Laura Quilter / lqui...@lquilter.net

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[dbur...@gmail.com]

We just had a question about this earlier this week. A journal rejected a student manuscript for showing up on turnitin.com from digital commons. 

They accused the student of "self plagiarism" and we're trying to work with the publisher to explain that it hasn't been published even if it shows up in digital commons. The nuance is difficult it seems. 

I try to advise students interested in publishing (and who are worried about it) against embargoing but then instances like this pop up. I would have thought most journals would know that theses are often online now. 

Dylan Burns

Digital Scholarship Librarian

Merrill-Cazier Library 

Utah State University 

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[Erin Jerome]

That’s so unfortunate, Dylan.

 

I try to advise students to think carefully about their abstracts in cases like this – sometimes the abstract itself ends up being the publisher’s red flag.  Since the Graduate School doesn’t require the student to include an abstract and they only check over the thesis/dissertation itself, the students have some creative wiggle room there.

 

Erin Jerome, PhD

Open Access & Institutional Repository Librarian

Music & Dance Department Liaison

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

ewje...@library.umass.edu

(413)545-2174

Schedule an appointment: http://libcal.library.umass.edu/appointment/34490

 

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[Anton Angelo]

Kia ora koutou,

 

I rely on a few resources to advise those who are nervous about not embargoing their ETDs in our IR.  The most useful is this:

 

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/theses-copyright/theses-and-article-publishing/

 

Why they trust MIT and not me, I have no idea.  :D

 

Ngā mihi,

 

Anton

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[Leila Belle Sterman]

"They accused the student of "self plagiarism" and we're trying to work with the publisher to explain that it hasn't been published even if it shows up in digital commons. The nuance is difficult it seems. "

Our ETDs have been online for 15 years and my institution was not on the cutting edge. Is this the first time a publisher/journal has seen work that is adapted from a thesis or dissertation or are they just reacting to new information from a new anti-plagiarism software?

Publishers should be well aware of the academic process and understand what an ETD is and how it fits into the scholarly conversation. "Publishing" at this point is semantic, as many of you have stated, but posting online is rather normal at the end of a graduate degree. 

I usually warn graduate students that they should be suspicious of anyone who wants to publish their thesis or dissertation without some revision, that often a chapter does not equal a journal article without substantial editing.

I would be wary of a publisher who was very confused about open access ETDs. I would understand if they did not want to publish verbatim content from an ETD, or did not want to publish material from a dissertation or thesis at all, but to not understand what an ETD is, is unrealistic. Submitting evidence of an ETD, and policies around their requirements for graduation should be enough. 

Leila Sterman

 

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Montana State University Library
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(406) 994-4519
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[dbur...@gmail.com]

I agree, I think the advisor is on the paper as well so it is probably a non-predatory publication (although even PhDs get tricked).  It's so odd  because you'd think publications would know about ETDs at this point. 

It's also the first time I've heard of a journal using anti-plagiarism software at all. It's weird all around.

Dylan 

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[Leila Belle Sterman]

In that case why is there the "All # versions" tab at the bottom of a google scholar listing? If an item is actually the same item, the indexing system knows that and sorts them together. When this conversation becomes about traffic to a certain site instead of access to information, we are all in trouble and have been overtaken by the shadow of download metrics. 

Megan, 

You are correct that ethically scholars should cite their own work, but I doubt anyone would get far suing themselves for reuse of their own work. Yes, copyright is assigned at posting/publication/public display/fixed display but copyright shouldn't be the concern here. Plagiarism is not usually a legal concern, but an ethical one. And generations of academics have reused content from dissertations or published a methods paper to go along with their review paper and their eventual results paper. 

My institution also allows "manuscript version" thesis and dissertations where a suite of journal articles are bound together by common thread, an introduction, conclusion, and any other important information. This is posted online as their thesis and each chapter is published as journal articles. 

Leila Sterman (also not a lawyer)

On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 10:59 AM, O'Donnell, Megan N [LIB] <m...@iastate.edu> wrote:

Frankly I think this is sound advice.

They are completely right about Google and it’s algorithms. It makes sense for Google to prioritize unique work over what, to it, may appear as a duplicate work.

 

To be blunt, republishing parts of a theses/dissertation is “self plagiarism" if it’s your own work. It’s plain old “plagiarism” if it’s someone else’s work. This doesn’t stop faculty and graduate students from doing it. However, the fact that it’s common practice means it’s not ethically viewed by the community as the same kind of infraction as when parts of a prior article is reworked into a new article.

(it’s still highly ethically suspect activity imoho)

 

As I understand it: as far as the US Copyright office is concerned, an ETD in a repository is just as official as a “published” article. Both are fixed forms. What is “published” anyhow? This word often is used to mean “it went through peer review” but it really just means “to make available.”

 

-Megan, not a lawyer, O’Donnell

 

Megan O’Donnell
Data Services Librarian

Entomology, EEOB, NREM, and Environment Librarian
Iowa State University Library
m...@iastate.edu   (515) 294-1670

Impact Story  ORCiD: 0000-0002-4632-6642

Personal pronouns: she/her

 

 

From: scholcom...@lists.ala.org [mailto:scholcomm-request@lists.ala.org] On Behalf Of Dylan Burns
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 11:26 AM
To: Leila Belle Sterman <sterma...@gmail.com>; Erin Jerome <ewje...@library.umass.edu>
Cc: irman...@googlegroups.com; Laura Quilter <lqui...@lquilter.net>; Gordon, Larissa <gor...@arcadia.edu>; Virginia Barbour, Executive Director, AOASG <aoas...@gmail.com>; Waller, Jen <jenw...@ou.edu>; ACRL Scholarly Communication List <scho...@lists.ala.org>; ETD <e...@ndltd.org>

Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] [irmanagers] Re: [etd] Re: what is considered published?

 

Hi all, 

 

This is the response we received from the publisher:

 

In the past, we have asked that authors either remove the other version on their website’s digital commons or, if this is not possible, that they modify their text so that it is more unique from the previous article. 

 

[snip]

 

In addition to these copyright implications, here’s another reason that you all may not be aware of to avoid duplicating content. In recent years, Google and other search engines have started to parse articles and majorly penalize (e.g., lower search engine rankings) for websites that publish repeated content.

 

Google and others like to keep the specifics of their algorithms in the dark to prevent publishers (like me, haha!) from skirting their rules. So there’s no way to know for sure that this specific situation would penalize us, but it is all-around safer for Psi Chi Journal’s articles, the Psi Chi website in general, the author’s name, and the author’s Digital Commons site if we avoid duplicating large sections of text.

 

As [Faculty member] suggests, it might be legally possible to obtain copyright permission to reprint those sections of the article, but when/if Google locates significant repeated text, it probably will not matter whether there is a copyright agreement or not. We already have far too well-meaning authors who are share their full articles on other websites, thinking that they are helping themselves when they are probably doing the exact opposite. Instead, they should just be sharing links that lead back to the one central location of their article (in this case, on the Psi Chi website).

 

So, if at all possible, I suggest that the authors rework the wording of their paper to make it more original. I hope this is helpful information!

 

I am very confused as to how to respond. Has anyone heard of this thing with Google?

 

Dylan Burns

 

Digital Scholarship Librarian

Merrill-Cazier Library

Utah State University

3000 Old Main Hill

Logan, UT 84322-3000

[Leila Belle Sterman]

A clarification: Megan is right that a journal could claim copyright and ask for the ETD to be taken down.