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If any data in a manuscript have been included in other published or unpublished manuscripts, the legend of each table or illustration reporting such data must cite those manuscripts.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 a personal or institutional homepage or ftp site will generally be considered as a preprint; this will not be grounds for viewing the manuscript as published. Similarly, posting of manuscripts in public preprint archives or in an institution's public archive of unpublished theses will not be considered grounds for declaring a manuscript published. 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. A partial test for prior publication is whether the manuscript has appeared in some entity with archival value so that it is permanently available to reasonably diligent scholars. A necessary test for prior publication is whether the author can legally transfer copyright to ESA.
rev 2/18/10
