No prior publication
ESA journals require that all submissions be original contributions and that, when in doubt, full disclosure of possible redundant publication must be made in the letter of submission. Under certain circumstances, use of the same data in two or more publications is appropriate and beneficial. This may be particularly true when new information allows reinterpretation of previously published data. In many cases, however, duplicate publication is wasteful of journal space and user resources. It is the Editor's responsibility to decide whether specific duplications are useful or wasteful. These decisions are generally based on information supplied by the authors. To facilitate this process, ESA journals have adopted a policy that at the time of submission, authors must provide information describing the extent to which data or text in the manuscript have been used in other papers that are published, in press, submitted, or soon to be submitted elsewhere. In cases of overlap with other publications or submissions, authors should include copies of the papers in question along with the submission.
Sometimes it is difficult to assess whether a work has truly been published previously. If a previous work was published in a journal or book that is already available in libraries or available for libraries to purchase, we expect no more than one-third overlap between the previous publication and the submission to ESA. Reference should be made to any closely related previous publication, especially if a table or figure is reproduced. When in doubt, an author should supply copies of the previous publication to be sent to the Subject-matter Editor and reviewers, who would then be asked to consider this matter.
If any data in a manuscript have been included in other published or unpublished manuscripts, the legend of each table or illustration reporting such data must cite those manuscripts. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce previously published material.
A posting of a manuscript or thesis on an author’s personal or home institution’s website or ftp site generally will not be considered previous publication. Similarly posting of a “working paper” in an institutional repository is allowed so long as at least one of the authors is affiliated with that institution. Submitted manuscripts may have been posted to a preprint archive if the papers in the archive are not peer-reviewed, and provided that a link to the published article will be added if the manuscript is accepted by an ESA journal. Authors should disclose whether such a posting has been made at the time of submission. If a manuscript is available as part of a digital publication such as a journal, technical series, or some other entity to which a library can subscribe (especially if that publication has an ISSN or ISBN), we will consider that the manuscript has been published and is thus not eligible for consideration by our journals. Finally, a necessary test for prior publication is whether the author can legally transfer copyright to ESA.
rev 1/15/13
