<p>General comments for my friends who have posted recently:</p>
<p>I agree that the idea of “self-plagiarism” is an oxymoron.</p>
<p>I am pretty certain that the American Chemical Society does not permit authors to repeat their own published work, even if they cite it. Very short summaries, yes, to place the new material in context; re-listing of earlier results in tables along with new results, again yes; but the “whole cloth,” no. I read the ACS rule as saying that you do not need to cite phrases such as “The solution of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation for the molecule in an applied field of frequency omega” while in the humanities world, stringing together this many words without change would appear to require a citation.</p>
<p>One element that bears closer scrutiny: several journals refer to “journals of primary record,” or some equivalent phrase. They mean that work should appear only once in a “real” research journal. This permits re-publication (with permission) in collections of work. The status of conference proceedings is less clear. Some conference proceedings are issued to only the 100-200 people who attended a particular conference. In that case, one doesn’t want to bury the work, by publishing the results only in the conference proceedings–so some kind of work-around, permissions, excerpting, different emphasis, etc. has to be worked out.</p>
<p>It is relevant to this particular discussion that journals with which I am familiar require a “Transfer of Copyright,” so that the journal owns the copyright to the article, once it has been accepted. This prevents republication, because the author is no longer the copyright holder.</p>