There is no such thing as splat. If it is your writing and your ideas – re-furbrishing, re-publishing, massaging, changing etc. are your right for having done the original work/idea/data collection in the first place. See, e.g. mickey mouse.

Is this a strong argument for this model?

As regards the exposure comments, I have the impression that in physics now, journal publishing is nearly an afterthought with respect to actual work—needed for promotion decisions, but for nothing else. Everything important gets communicated via preprints. I’m not a physicist, though—this is just what I heard.

(ad nauseum.)

What we need is a better definition of self-plagiarism, but this is very difficult to do because it requires some tough calls with not enough information about what others, let alone posterity, will eventually find useful. Though, given that eventually all journals will be online for the sake of space, delay time, and expense, this will become less of an issue.

Plus, it’s like saying that you only get to do one version of the Aristocrats…

But in response to Paul Gowder in #17, I think that the idea is that both splat and “real” plagiarism harm the discipline almost equally. In both cases, work is duplicated and journal space is taken up that could go to other interesting ideas. In the case of “real” plagiarism, there’s the extra issue of credit and career building, while with self-plagiarism there’s at least no victim of that sort. But if the general ethical imperative of academic publishing is to let the world know about new ideas that you have, then both forms of plagiarism are violations.

Probably true, but as open access gains traction and online archiving/searching keeps improving, I think impact factors will lose a lot of their power.

Now that is genuine self-plagiarism because it is deliberately deceptive, and passes something off to the reader.

In the cases which you find distasteful, the academics here are gaming the system, but it is fraud rather than plagiarism – trying to create a false CV with inflated publications.

Mind you, it could also just be narcissism.

I think this is the reference for the HIggins stuff, though its not on the net and I’m not at a library: Steinhauer, Yvette, Jack Higgins: If He’s Said It Once, He’s Said It a Thousand Times’, Age Good Weekend, 24 June 1988, 51–55.

Not while Impact factors hold sway they won’t.

i) Write “It is well-known that…” as an excuse not to give a reference. Well, it’s not well-known to me, now that I’m reading your paper 20 years later. If it’s really “well-known” then surely there must be a good reference?

ii) Write “The following has a short proof, see” and then gives a reference to a paper in Russian in some obscure Japanese journal (okay, I exagerate). If it’s a short proof, and the best reference is really obscure, then would it really hurt to give the proof (obviously noting that it’s not original)?

I guess it comes down to if you view papers as giving very technial, incremental additions of knowledge (in which case maybe background isn’t needed) or if papers should be more self-contained, widely read pieces of work. I tend towards the latter view: many papers in maths are more important (IMHO) for the techniques they demonstrate than the actual results they prove: anything to improve readability, and to give a guide as to where this work is coming from, can only be a good thing.

I do wonder, however, if journals perhaps don’t help in their quest for short papers. I feel a bit of pressure to put a single solid result in a paper and send it off, even if I might really have a result and a half. This keeps the paper shorter, and the hope is that I can work the half-a-result into a full result, and publish it later…