Hi All,

 

I’m going to throw in a dissenting opinion and say that the authors should push back against the publisher. In effect the publisher is acknowledging that the work they have done to peer-review, copyedit and typeset the manuscript does not add any value to what is already available in the thesis. If the publisher has improved the work then they should stand behind the paper and publish it anyway.

 

Secondly, most publishers have quite permissive policies when it comes to publications based on student theses - https://osc.cam.ac.uk/theses/advice-phd-students/publishing-and-open-access

 

Publisher positions on Open Access theses

Cambridge University Press

"Authors who make their thesis openly accessible in their institution's repository will not be prevented from publishing the work later on as a monograph with Cambridge University Press."

Routledge

"Routledge will sometimes publish books based on theses, and acknowledge that in some instances students may have their thesis openly accessible on their institution's repository. It is usual that once a contract for publication is agreed that this thesis be shut down and only accessible to members of the home institution. This required period of restricted access may vary but will typically be around eighteen months after the publication of the book. The metadata (information about the thesis) may remain available and the thesis can be requested through mechanisms such as inter library loan during this restricted access period. However Routledge recognises that some authors are bound by requirements of their institution or their funder to make their thesis open access. For this reason there is not a hard rule and each case will be considered separately." (Wording provided by Routledge May 2017)

Palgrave Macmillan

"Palgrave Macmillan accepts proposals based on dissertations, even when those dissertations have been made available in online repositories. To be considered ready for publication, those dissertations must have been significantly revised." (Taken from Palgrave Macmillan's Early Career Researcher Hub, which also has some further advice)

Indeed, Elsevier go so far as to state that https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb/authors/journal-authors/policies-and-ethics

 

Elsevier does not view the following uses of a work as prior publication: publication in the form of an abstract; publication as an academic thesis; publication as an electronic preprint. 

 

So the authors have plenty of other venues to publish their work that won’t give two hoots about whether the paper is similar to an Open Access thesis.

 

When it comes to plagiarism detection software – so what? The provenance of the work is clearly known so it’s just the publisher being inflexible in this case. The authors should not be forced to rework their paper to meet some arbitrary metric.

 

Best,

Arthur

 

--

Dr Arthur Smith

Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication (Open Access)

Office of Scholarly Communication

Cambridge University Library

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Thank you all for your responses to this.  The agreed pragmatic response appears to be to put the thesis on closed access.  However, in this particular case (perhaps because the thesis was originally open access and is now in their text corpus) the publisher is still asking the authors to reword the article so the plagiarism detection software doesn’t report such a high level of text-matching.  To my mind this is publishers creating a burdensome work-around to a problem of their own making.  It meets the letter (the software won’t spot the article is similar) but not the spirit (the article will still be similar!) of their own regulations. 

 

It is interesting that in order to be a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) publishers’ “Policies should be clear on what counts as prepublication that will preclude consideration.”  In this particular case, the publisher simply states that “Your manuscript should not contain any information that has already been published.”  This is not the same thing.  It would seem to me that in both this case and cases where publishers ARE clear but don’t adhere to their policies, it would be worth the community drawing COPE’s attention to these inconsistencies.

 

All best

Elizabeth

 

 

 

 

Dear Elisabeth,

We have had a couple of instances recently where researchers have contacted us an asked us to restrict access to their Ph D thesis in our repository because that version has been deemed to be too close to the submitted manuscript by a publisher. We have restricted the access and wished them luck the next time they submit the paper. We have also added a recommendation to our information page that a Ph D. student should only make the comprehensive summary freely available if there are manuscripts included in the thesis and upload a full copy with restricted access that can be made freely available later.

 

Best regards,

Jörgen Eriksson

Lund University Library

 

 

Dear colleagues

 

We have observed an increase in the use of Turnitin plagiarism detection software by journal publishers.  This is causing problems when a paper is submitted to a journal which is based on a PhD thesis sitting in an Institutional Repository.  Even where a journal publisher states that a thesis does not count as prior publication, the large degree of overlap between the paper and the thesis as detected by Turnitin is causing papers to be rejected or returned.  I wondered whether other colleagues have noticed this and how you have advised authors to respond?

 

Many thanks

Elizabeth

 

Dr Elizabeth Gadd MCLIP, FHEA

Research Policy Manager (Publications)

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Loughborough University

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