operations. Referees give their services free, solely out of a sense
of professional commitment or obligation. And most editors
draw only a modest honorarium or get no payment at all. It is
consequently seen as a major abuse of trust to get free advice
and guidance from journals’ referees and editors while sending
out the same paper to different journals at the same time. If edi-
tors find that you have made multiple submissions they will
mostly react by immediately rejecting your paper and possibly
blackballing you for any future consideration of your work.
Academic networks are closer than you might think, and edi-
tors and referees gossip heavily about mistakes like this. If you
make multiple submissions they will quickly be detected and
give you an unfavourable reputation. So this potentially serious
mistake must be scrupulously avoided. If you have a paper
under consideration by one journal which has taken ages con-
sidering it, you still need to notify the editor formally that you
are withdrawing the paper from consideration with them
before sending it on to a different journal.
Some PhD students each year also make mistakes about the
conventions on ‘dual publication’ of material. As soon your
material has been accepted in one academic journal it cannot
be considered, let alone republished, in any other journal. If
you were to succeed in reprinting large amounts of the same
material in a second article then the journal involved would be
breaching the first journal’s copyright. It could perhaps have to
pulp its whole issue. The personal consequences for you would
also be severe. Your reputation within the academic community
would be damaged, since by ‘plagiarizing yourself’ you would
seem to be inflating your curriculum vitae or résumé by under-
hand means. So this is a quick route to professional suicide.
However, it is not only permissible but perfectly acceptable
for you to republish a journal article (usually in a somewhat
revised form) later on in a book. This could be either as a com-
ponent of your whole thesis if you can get this accepted by a
publisher (see below), or as a chapter in an edited book.
Journals take the copyright of any paper which they publish, so
if you want to reuse your article material in your book or in an
edited collection you need to get the journal publisher’s per-
mission to do so, and to include an acknowledgement of where
it first appeared. Journal editors and publishers always give
250 ◆AUTHORING A PHD