Verbatim republication of a journal article as a book chapter, with no acknowledgment of the article. Common practice or misconduct?
Hoping someone can tell me whether I'm reading this right or making too much of it.
A scholar publishes a peer-reviewed journal article in 2020. The next year, the same scholar publishes a single-author book with a major academic press, and one chapter of that book reproduces the article almost verbatim. Same paragraphs, same footnotes, same archival document numbers, even small typos that carry across. Sentence-level overlap is over 80%.
The 2020 article is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license, with copyright held by the publishing academy. The 2021 book is "all rights reserved" with a commercial academic press. The book's bibliography includes several of the author's other works but doesn't cite or acknowledge the 2020 article anywhere. No preface note, no chapter-opening footnote, nothing in the bibliography.
I know this isn't plagiarism in the traditional sense since it's the same author. But I have some questions for people who've thought harder about this than I have.
- Is undisclosed self-republication (text recycling, duplicate publication, whatever the term) generally accepted, generally considered misconduct, or does it really depend on the field?
- Does the change in copyright holder (academy to commercial press) raise a separate copyright issue on top of the ethics question, or does the journal's standard author reuse policy usually cover that?
- If the usual fix is a footnote saying something like "an earlier version of this chapter appeared as," does the complete absence of any such acknowledgment change how this should be evaluated, or is it just a housekeeping miss?
- Do norms differ for academic books aimed at general or trade readers versus peer-reviewed monographs?
Field is humanities, area studies. Happy to share more detail if it helps.
Posted May 1, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC