A manuscript was submitted to Journal A. A routine CrossCheck report revealed a 70% match to the author's PhD thesis. The journal recommended that the author expand the article with new content.
The author raised an objection, arguing that the PhD thesis is not published in a journal, but is only included in the institutional library.
The journal noted that related issues had been considered in a case brought to a COPE Forum. Based on this, they would like to confirm whether this manuscript can be further processed.
Questions for COPE Council
- Does the action depend on the journal's policy on dissertations?
- Can the article be processed further if the current archiving institution gives consent?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
This is a very common scenario faced by recent or current research students and as a general rule COPE considers that inclusion of a PhD thesis in an institutional library should not in itself present an insurmountable barrier to publication. It is important to note that dissertations are not published by the university, they are ‘archived’. In many countries public archiving of theses is mandated by universities unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. However, if individuals lift text verbatim from their thesis in their manuscripts, it may be picked up by text-matching software (TMS) when it is submitted to a journal. It should also be noted that in many disciplines much of the thesis will already have been published prior to the submission of the thesis, without being regarded as plagiarism.
The journal’s course of action will depend on their policy on what counts as prior formal publication, the type of thesis, and the university’s policy on theses. Usually the student retains copyright, but in some cases where the work was done as part of a larger project led by a Principal Investigator there may be intellectual property considerations. Where the student retains copyright they are unlikely to need to request permission from the university although editors could consider making it clear that it is the author’s responsibility to check their local regulations.
The relevant COPE guidelines can be found here.
In general, however, it is advised that journals make their policies on theses clear. A citation, an acknowledgement or a footnote can all be adequate signals that the article was an adaptation or extension of graduate student research. The editors might also like to request that authors make it clear if the work is based on a thesis which is publicly searchable via the university repository, for example, in a cover letter. Some journals do have very strict policies on prior publication and may ask for embargoes on theses if they wish to be the first discloser of the work, or refuse to consider content that has been made available elsewhere in any form, but this is unusual.