A manuscript sent to Peer Academics must be original, must not have been published before, and must not be under consideration anywhere else. This page explains what those words mean in practice, what you must disclose at submission, what the journal counts as acceptable prior circulation, and what happens when the rule is broken. The reason for the rule is not possessiveness about content: duplicate publication wastes reviewers' unpaid time, distorts the record by making one piece of evidence look like several, and creates versions of a text that later disagree with each other.
The three problems
- Concurrent (simultaneous) submission — the same manuscript, or one substantially the same, is under consideration at Peer Academics and at another journal at the same time. One journal at a time, without exception. Being slow is not a reason to open a second file elsewhere.
- Duplicate or redundant publication — work that has already been published, in whole or in substantial part, is presented as new. This includes republishing your own article in another language, as a book chapter, or in a proceedings volume, without disclosure and permission; and it includes a paper that adds little to one you have already published.
- Salami slicing — one study divided into several papers, each reporting a fragment, in order to produce more publications from the same work. The journal treats the resulting papers as redundant even where no single sentence is repeated.
What is not prior publication
- A preprint on a recognized server, before, during, or after review here. Disclose it; see Preprints.
- A thesis or dissertation deposited in an institutional repository, including work derived from it. Say in the submission comments which thesis and where it is held.
- A conference abstract, poster, or short summary. A full paper published in conference proceedings is prior publication; a substantially extended version of it may be considered, but only if you say so, cite the proceedings paper, and explain what is new.
- A working paper or a departmental report, if disclosed and cited.
- An article presenting a new analysis of data you have used before, provided the earlier article is cited and the new question and new contribution are stated explicitly.
The salami test
Before splitting a study, ask whether each paper answers a distinct research question, stands on its own without the others, and would still be worth publishing if the others existed. If a reader would have to hold two of your papers side by side to understand either, they are one paper. Where you do publish related papers from one dataset or project, each must cite the others, state the shared source of the data, and say what it adds. Cohort, corpus, and long-running field studies are often reported in more than one article legitimately, and the editor judges that by contribution, not by a rule about overlap percentages.
What you must disclose at submission
In the comments to the editor — not in the anonymized manuscript file, which must not identify you — state:
- any preprint, thesis, working paper, conference paper, or report that contains this work, with its permanent link;
- any earlier publication that uses the same data, sample, corpus, or field site, with the citation;
- any related manuscript under consideration elsewhere, or about to be submitted, with the journal and a short statement of how it differs;
- any version of this text previously submitted to Peer Academics or to another journal, and what came of it;
- any translation of the work, published or planned.
Disclosure is not an admission. Editors decline manuscripts for undisclosed overlap far more often than for the overlap itself.
Withdrawing before submitting elsewhere
If you want to take a manuscript to another journal while it is with Peer Academics — including while a revision is pending or an appeal is open — withdraw it first. Write to [email protected] and wait for written confirmation. Until you have that confirmation the manuscript is still under consideration here. Withdrawal is always granted; the journal does not hold a manuscript against an author's wishes, and withdrawing does not prejudice a later submission.
Secondary publication
Republication of an article in another language or in another venue is possible in principle, but only where both editors know of it and agree in writing before it happens, where the secondary version states prominently and in full that the work was first published in Peer Academics and gives the citation, and where the secondary version faithfully reflects the original. Because the journal's licensing terms are not yet fixed — see the Publishing Model — ask the editor before you commit to any secondary publication of an article published here.
How the journal checks, and what follows
Every submission is screened for textual overlap at editorial screening, and the matches are read by an editor rather than treated as a score; see Plagiarism and Text Recycling. Editors also check the disclosures you make and, where a related paper is mentioned, may ask for its full text.
- Found before a decision: the manuscript is paused and you are asked to explain, normally within two weeks. A satisfactory explanation, or a disclosure you should have made but made late in good faith, may allow review to continue; concurrent submission or undisclosed prior publication normally leads to the manuscript being declined.
- Found after acceptance but before publication: the acceptance is withdrawn.
- Found after publication: the article is retracted, under Corrections and Retractions, and the notice states which article duplicated which.
- In every case: the matter is handled under Misconduct Investigations, you are given the chance to reply before any finding, and the journal may inform your institution and the other journal involved.
If you are unsure whether something you have written or posted counts as prior publication, ask [email protected] before you submit. A question costs you an email; a retraction costs considerably more.