Publishing again acknowledging the original publication of oneself

Question

I have come across the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA). The copyright section says that "Authors retain the right to publish their material elsewhere, providing the original publication is acknowledged."

Can the same paper be sent to somewhere else as well. Given that I have seen that mostly conferences/journals require unpublished material, what does this clause exactly mean ? Is it normal clause in Open Access Journals ?

Answer 1

That means that IJACSA will not try to stop you from publishing your work elsewhere. (They'd have little reason to do so, as they are not profiting from it.) It is common for open-access journals to let the author retain the publication rights.

However, no reputable journal will publish an article that has already appeared somewhere else.

You could "publish" it on your web page, or on arXiv, or as part of a book (though again, a reputable book publisher will probably balk if the content is just recopied).

Note: IJACSA is published by The Science and Information Organization, which is on Beall's List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers. Its website makes the journal look very dubious, especially the ridiculously broad scope and the promise to complete peer review within 15 days. I wouldn't publish there (or would I?).

Answer 2

I think the more specific meaning of this statement should be that you have the right to:

• publish your work in alternate formats (on-line repositories, your website, internal technical reports, etc.)
• re-use excerpts from your work in alternate venues

The latter would be, for instance, to reprint a figure that you used in one publication in a second publication you've written, but simply citing that it came from the original figure.

Answer 3

It's very important to understand the difference between copyright law and academic ethics. They give you permission, waiving the normal copyright assignment process, to retain the copyright of the work you produced. You can thus republish it, in full or in part. While doing so in another journal, even with appropriate citation, would be unethical (journals require original content), there actually are some ethical ways in which this could happen:

• republishing as a chapter in a book, with a clear notice;
• republishing parts of it in course material;
• republishing “as is” in a more prestigious journal 20 years from now, if it so happens that your paper spawned an entire new field of research and is now revered as such
• reformatting it and putting it on your blog (which is a publication).