 Anyway, thank you for coming. This is our inaugural talk of our new research ethics theory, ethics series, which I'm very excited about. I've got Kerry Moskovitz here that we've been talking restaurants with. Kerry has served as the director of writing in the discipline in the Thompson Writing program at Duke University since 2005. He holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from North Carolina State University and a master's of architecture from Virginia Tech, which I think is a fascinating background. Kerry is director of the NSF-funded text recycling project, which I have been lecturing about for the last year because it's really important for my students, so I'm very excited to have him here. His articles and essays related to writing in pedagogy and text recycling have appeared in such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Science, Research Integrity, and Peer Review, Bioscience, Science and Engineering Ethics, and the Journal of College Science Teaching. So thank you for coming and welcome. I'm going to turn it over to Kerry. Sure, thank you. And thanks for all of you for your restaurant recommendations. And for those of you watching later on video, you're going to have to get those for yourself. Thank you to the NSF for making this project possible. This is actually the sixth year of what was originally a five-year grant with a one-year extension. So we've been working on this issue for a long time, and it's great to have the funding to do that, not only for myself but for colleagues, of which I want to recognize some key people here. So some of the ideas we'll be talking about today were developed in part with some of these folks. I'll just make one particular mention here of David Hansen, who's now the director of Authors Alliance. Before that, he was at Duke University Libraries and was basically our head copyright expert. So he's been on this project from the beginning, and that's been really important because the legal issues are as important as the ethical issues, and none of it is simple, which gives us plenty to do for six years, and maybe somebody else wants to do the next six. So let's start here. So what is this thing we're talking about, text recycling? Well, here's what I would say is a pretty archetypal example. So you can see the top passage here was from a publication in Science in 2010, the one below it, from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. And you can see these two passages are identical except for the small stuff highlighted in yellow there. Excuse me. One thing that I also want to notice, note, and we'll be coming back and talking about this in a little while, is there are, I'm trying to remember, something like five authors on each of these papers, but the authors are not identical. And that's a pretty common situation in the world of research and certainly in STEM fields. So this is an example of recycling from one journal article to another journal article. There are reasons that people do that. People also recycle in a lot of other conditions in context as well. So for instance, you might have written a grant proposal and then take some of that stuff and put it into an article, or an IRB protocol that makes it into a poster, a dissertation to an article or to a book. And the reality is those of us who are involved in the research process routinely recycle things as a matter of just getting our work done. Some things like recycling from, let's say, a poster to an article. If we were training our grad students or postdocs, we would say, yes, do that. Why would you not do that? Waste your time and just making it different because you already wrote it up in a poster. Then there come things like this which are a little more confusing and when people are a little less certain about the issues there. Quick note on terminology. When people started paying attention to this practice of reusing stuff specifically in the realm of from one published piece to another published piece, maybe 20 years ago is when really that conversation started, it quickly got the name self-plagiarism. And that name basically stuck until probably within the last eight to 10 years where we, the Committee on Publication Ethics and some other organizations, are trying to push people away from that toward the term text recycling. And the basic reason is this. Unlike plagiarism, there are lots of times when reusing your own stuff is appropriate, ethical, legal. And so people who use the term self-plagiarism oftentimes end up writing some really bizarre twisted logical constructions about how self-plagiarism under certain circumstances is OK. And then other places, they're using the word just to mean something that you should never do because it's like plagiarism. So people would say, self-plagiarism, it's still plagiarism, therefore you shouldn't do it. And then other places, well, it's appropriate. So what we want to do is basically help people use text recycling. And that may be inappropriate or appropriate, legal or legal, depending on the situations. So this is our definition. Turned out to be a non-trivial exercise over quite a while to come up with a workable definition. Text recycling is the reuse of textual material that might include prose, visuals, or equations in a new document where these three things are true. First, the material in the new document is either identical to that of the source or subsequently equivalent in both form and content. And here's why we have that paracethetical expression because a lot of cases what people have been told to do, and we'll talk about this more in a moment, is instead of recycling to reword it or rewrite it, make it look different. But the idea of this, say, well, because you've put in some synonyms, you've rearranged some clauses, you're not basically reusing the stuff. It's nonsensical. Clearly, you're reusing it. You're just reusing it and disguising it. Second, that material is not identified as a quotation. So if you have a sentence or a phrase or a paragraph from your own work and you put quotation marks around it or you indent it as a block quote, we don't consider it recycling anymore. It's a quotation and you would follow whatever the norms are in your discipline for that. Then last, at least one author of the new document is also an author of the prior document. So if we go back to this slide, you can see why that's necessary. How many of you are in some STEM field? Raise your hands. For those of you who are not, actually, for all of you, let me ask you this question. How many of you have ever published a journal article in any kind? Raise your hand. How many of you published as a solo author? So the thing is, in the sciences, engineering, medicine, physics, biology, very few papers are solo authored. And if you look at the work that comes out of research groups, which is the way most research is done in STEM fields, whether it's at a university or a research lab, whatever it is, private, what we find is as the group advances its work and does multiple publications, it's rare that the authors of all those publications stay exactly the same. Matter of fact, we did a kind of offshoot project from a corpus of papers that were written with NSF grants across different fields. And we found basically five papers that were written out of the same grant. And that's what we used to study recycling within those groups. We couldn't do it by author because the authorship changes. But what we found was picking a random two papers from any given research group from this corpus of like 100 different grants, 6% of them had identical authorship from one paper to another. You might have eight of the same nine people in a different statistician or one person who was there before moved to take another job, whatever it is, or a postdoc or a grad student who moved on. So this is where the definition between text recycling and some kind of like allowable plagiarism get a little weird. And we don't want people to be confused by that. So we decided basically overlap of one author on a definitional basis would be necessary because otherwise there's a completely arbitrary number like you have 50 authors on the paper and medical sciences on developing a vaccine. And the next paper has 42 in which 30 overlap. How would you decide whether or not it's the same author or not? So if we're looking for exactly the same authors, that would never apply. And anything we develop would have no value basically. So that's why we decided, definitionally, if there's at least an overlap of one author, and then we can decide what's ethical or appropriate once you know that at least you have that overlap, which would be different if you had no overlap and then it's just somebody else's material. So let's talk a little about ethics and practicalities here. So if you just went looking randomly on the internet for advice, which people do, and actually that's one of the main reasons that we started this project was there was no place that people could go for any kind of authoritative guidance. Everything was random people's opinions about something they thought or believed or somebody told them. So if you just go looking, you find things like this. Recycling is good for trash but unacceptable for scientific literature, says an editorial in the Journal of American Nurse Practitioners, although that journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics. They have guidelines for text recycling that say this. Some degree of text recycling in the background or introduction section of the article may be unavoidable. Duplication of background ideas may be considered less significant or even considered desirable. For methods similarly, use of similar identical phrases where there are limited ways of describing methods is not unusual. It may actually be a value when a technique that is common to a number of papers is described. And so the reason that I showed you these two examples here, this and this, is because it's indicative of the informational problem. Even some places that say do X will lead you to someplace else or there links to say don't do X or vice versa. So it's impossible for individuals to navigate this and come up with useful guidance on their own because it's just what you find would be entirely random. So one of the key things that we realize we need to address about text recycling is why commonly recommended alternatives are not necessarily good alternatives. So what we found through our research was that oftentimes editors or mentors would say don't recycle because of the self-plagiarism problems and either thinking it's inherently wrong to do for because somebody told him it was or it just doesn't seem right or it may infringe copyrights. So do something else instead, a kind of risk aversion approach to writing. So I'm gonna talk with you just briefly about the three kind of commonly suggested alternatives. One is you don't need to say it again, summarize it and cite the original and people can go look at the original. And there are certainly times when that makes sense. If it's a detailed method and that method was described in the prior paper that you wrote, it might make perfect sense to explain it briefly in two or three sentences and say go see the paper from 2019 or whatever that was. But that's not universally a useful alternative. One reason is that editors oftentimes don't want their readers to have to go somewhere else to find the rest of that article. Especially given the fact that the original may be behind a paywall and so editors often is like, yeah we could do that but I want it here in this article and then that's not your choice as an author. So another one we see a lot as people say, well just put it in quotes, right? That's like that's the way you do. If you have some exact words from a source you put it in quotes and that's standard scholarly practice. Well, the reality is there is no such thing as standard scholarly practice. It depends on the particular community, the norms of that field, et cetera. And what we found is that the idea that you can say, just put it in quotes and be done with it, must be guidance given by people who have never actually looked to see what text recycling looks like in practice versus some theoretical idea. So here's what I mean. If you had a single paragraph or three sentences in the paper you wanted to use in another paper you could put that in quotes, right? It would not be crazy distracting although when you put something in quotation marks it draws attention to it. That's part of the nature of quoting is there's something about this language that I want you to pay particular attention to but when it's just like a description of an experimental apparatus that's not what you don't want them paying particular attention you just need those words and they're the same words in the new context. The other thing that's even more problematic is when people recycle they almost never recycle like a single contiguous block of text and that's it. Instead it looks more like this. So here's a paper from a psychology journal. You can see the methods is over there results and discussion starts there it's a short paper. The stuff that's highlighted in gray are the recycled parts, right? And so what you see is there's chunks sometimes whole sentences, sometimes a paragraph sometimes 90% of a paragraph. Oftentimes the earlier material needs to be changed for the new context because you might, for instance, use the same sampling methods to get subjects but you have a different sample. Their ages are different, the sample size is different, right? So it's not like you can just take a big chunk of text and indent it with quotations amount. You would need like 30 different sets of quotations to do this. No editor in a STEM field is gonna let you put a paper with 30 cents of quotations just to deal with the text recycling stuff, right? So it's really a non-starter option. Absolutely. Oh, so, yeah. Can I just see single words? Yeah, so this was generated with authenticate, right? So it matches things and so probably within a certain part of the paper those words matched similar enough with the area of the prior paper. I don't remember what the algorithm details are, right? But basically I left all this in there because I didn't wanna manipulate it and then try to explain what it was, right? Right, right, and that's just what the software matched from the prior paper, yeah. So the other thing that people are told to do or think they're supposed to do is recycling is somehow problematic. Just change it, just make it look different. Sometimes people do that because they think I shouldn't have the same paragraphs and two different things I wrote. It just kinda looks skanky or something like that, right? Just a little sleazy, so I should change it so nobody will notice. The other is concerns about copyright infringement. And so in our interviews that we did with editors, we heard from a number of editors who said, I'm worried that if we keep a paragraph or two that's identical to the prior paper, we'll be infringing copyright and then we have to worry about lawsuits, okay? I'm gonna get to the legal stuff in a minute. But basically rewording doesn't actually deal with the copyright problems. That is in other words, I could take a book by let's say Philip Roth and rearrange some sentences and change some synonyms. It's still fundamental of the same thing. I have not done anything to avoid infringing copyright if I would have infringed it. So that's basically people who think they know something about the law giving guidance to people about how to get around this problem and none of it is actually true. So here's a quote from a managing editor in a medical journal who says, I've been authenticating, do you all know what authenticate is? It's the kind of dominant plagiarism detection software used in kind of academia and particularly in the sciences. So most major journals now use authenticate to have a or cross check this same company to check for plagiarism. I've been authenticating all revised paper for several years now and I'm continually frustrated by self-plagiarism. You'd think that researcher authors with MDs and PhDs would be bright enough to know how to reword. So just gives you the sense that some people see this and say it's easy, just come up with some synonyms and rearrange things and the problem goes away. Well, the problem doesn't go away, creates new problems, but compare that to this astrophysicist who said, I just spent two tedious hours trying to reword the most boring chunks of my paper because I got pulled up on self-plagiarism. So this pulled up, that's what this person is doing. This editor ran the paper through authenticate, it says these paragraphs are identical, you need to change them, reword them. So that's how this person is now using his or her time. So not only does rewording it not really accomplish any net good ethically or legally, it also requires people then to spend time doing something which is unproductive of their time and introduces other ethical problems. For instance, in most science fields, the dominant language of practice is in English. Not everything's published in the sciences in English but most of the high level, highest ranked journals tend to be in English and in a lot of places where English is not the dominant language, researchers are expected to publish in English language journals in order to get promoted or advanced or tenure or even get a degree. So there's pressure for people to publish in English. Now you have people who already are undertaking what I think is an amazing thing of writing scientific work in a language which is not the language that they grew up speaking, that's hard enough, I couldn't do that. And now you're telling them, come up with a different way of saying the thing that you spent so much time saying that's gonna be equivalent, right? And can you imagine like if English is not a language that you're already fluent in trying to figure out, like are these words identical or not, right? Rearranging clauses, right? The odds of that writing getting worse are probably greater than it getting better and probably making it problematic. And the other thing is then you have people, the most important readers who were following this line of research then they have to figure out is this part of the methods here, is that identical to what they did before or is it different now, right? And that's a ridiculous way for people to spend their time. So yes, hold on a second, you should probably be speaking into this. So that's something that's come up in my classes quite a bit with my students, particularly the more senior students who feel it's disingenuous to rewrite methods that are the same because that's misleading to the reader. And that, as you said, creates its own ethical problem. So I'm curious, what are our best practices there? Yeah, so we're gonna get there in a second. But I think that underlying problem, the reality there is something that if anybody stops and thinks about it, like rewording things just to make it different. What's the ethical goal? What's the, and sometimes people think there's a legal objective which they have wrong usually. Excuse me. And so here's what this looks like in practice. When people feel they need to change it just to change it. So here are three passages. The first two are from New England Journal of Medicine, 2011, 2012, this is from Plas Medicine. These were papers done in a sequence developing a malaria vaccine. They're all from the same partnership group. And so actually if you go look at one of these papers, there's no actually individual authors listed on the front of the paper. It's the partnership. And then you look in the appendix and you can see the 120 authors or whatever it is. So you can see there is something that needed to be done here, right? Some work that needed to be done. They had to explain these things. Why we might ask would you put during 12 months of follow-up at the beginning of this sentence here and at the end of this sentence here, right? It can't be that that was a decision made to say oh, we did it this way before but now that we look at it again it would be better to put it at the end, right? You can see that basically you have phrases, sentences, rearranged synonyms substituted in, right? Here we have vaccine efficacy, here we have VE. Here we have 18 months of follow-up with months written MO versus months this way, et cetera. And it even gets to the point where they both have this sentence. Clinical malaria was defined as an illness accompanied by P-faceparam, asexual parasitemia and then the sentence in these three different papers ends in these three different ways. One's uses a greater than sign, one says at a density of more than and one says of more than. One uses the units of per cubic millimetres written this way, one this way and this one microliters which is the volumetric equivalent, right? I actually tried to interview, I couldn't get people from this to sit down and talk with me probably just that we're busy doing more important things like trying to get a vaccine for malaria. But it would be really interesting to know like how did this come about? But my guess having talked with a lot of people is it got flagged by authenticate or somebody told them you shouldn't just reuse the exact same thing. So instead of spending the time working on that vaccine, they're spending the time playing these word games. Yes. A lot of those things, oh. Right. I know that's true for the clause in the end. Thank you, thank you. And that certainly is fair that there's some differences in journal for that. Probably not where that clause goes. Right, yeah, right. That might be, right. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Okay, so we're gonna switch now and talk a little bit about terminology. So this is basically the state of affairs when we started studying this. Here are three, sorry, four terms that are commonly used in guidelines, contracts, research ethics, instructional materials, et cetera, around the general area of reusing one's own textual materials. So if you went to the Council of Scientific Editors that has a white paper on research ethics, you would find this. Plagiarism generally involves blah, blah, blah, jump down to the end. If you use your own stuff, it's sometimes called self-plagiarism or duplicate publication, right? So Council of Scientific Editors uses these two terms as synonyms. If we go to, oops, sorry, the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE, they say text recycling, also known as self-plagiarism. So these two terms are synonyms for them. They talk about that. And then they say a separate issue, not to be confused with text recycling, is redundant or duplicate publication, right? So you can see what's happening here is like, we use these terms to be synonyms. We use these terms to be distinct concepts. They're defining them in their own way without any reference to one another, even though, for instance, CSE is a member of COPE. Some of the people who are on COPE are also members of CSE, right? But nobody's looking at basically these weird language things. If we go to journals, we might see in Springer, for instance, that we would find redundant publication is the umbrella term for all reuse. Self-plagiarism is a subset of that. Text recycling is a subset of self-plagiarism. Or for Taylor and Francis, text recycling, self-plagiarism are synonyms. Within that is redundant or duplicate publication with the same thing, right? So that means that if you're trying to understand even like what the guidelines are for this particular organization or this particular journal that lists their ethical guidelines, that you may, when you sign a contract, have to attest that you are read or following. It's like, well, what do they mean by that term? Because that may mean something very different than what COPE's guidelines say, for instance. So we spent a fair amount of time grappling with this terminology issue and trying to come up with a set of terms that would be kind of suitably mutually exclusive and would align with the general ethical and legal issues, hoping to at least give people some language to use, but also give us some language to use. Because one of the things that we did after this was to develop things like a model text recycling policy, best practices and things like that. You need terms to be able to deal with those things. So I'm gonna walk you through our taxonomy. If you wanna read about the development of it, you can look at that. Oh, and just a quick note here. All of the documents produced by the text recycling research project are available free on our website, as are all of the publications that we've written. You can get the full text versions directly from our website. Also, worth a note that we have an advisory board of a dozen people, and they are from across the spectrum. So we have people who are like the former chair of COPE, was chair at the time, people who are head of research ethics for like Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, MIT Press, Harvard Medical School. So basically we got people who knew the for-profit publishing, the non-publishing world, the research ethics world to give us feedback on all the documents we developed that we would go back, revise, bring to them, and they've gone through multiple iterations. Not to say then they're perfect, nothing is, but we worked really hard to try to make sure that when we came up with guidance or policies, that they were gonna be generally acceptable by the general mass of people, at least across the STEM and worlds. So by developmental recycling, we mean recycling material from unpublished documents produced as part of the research and writing process. So you write a grant proposal, you have a description of prior work in the grant, you take some of those paragraphs, you put it in a new work, that would be developmental recycling. Or you did a poster, you take the stuff from the poster, you put it in an article. Generative recycling is something like with that science to PNAS example I show you. There the difference is the new work is intellectually distinct from the former work. So the way we think of it would be you go to the editor and you say, here's our prior paper, here's our new paper. They share some passages in common, but the new one is worthy of publication even though the old one exists and assumed that the editor would say yes, that's an intellectually distinct thing. Okay, so we call that generative recycling. Adaptive publication is taking either the entirety or the heart of the work of its content and text and reusing it either in a different genre or in a different language. So the idea here is you're saying, okay, we wrote this article and now we're republishing it in a collection or part of it on a blog or it was originally published in French and now we're publishing it in English, right? So there's a change in readership, language, genre, but the heart of the material is still the same and then duplicate publication is basically it's the same thing possibly with minor changes made to disguise it, you're just trying to squeeze another publication out of something that is not different. So I'm gonna walk you through the thinking about this here. So we start here and we say, is the source of the material published, right? Where you're recycling it from? If not, it's developmental, it's usually ethical, it's usually legal because when you write something, you automatically own copyright to it. So if you haven't transferred rights to somebody else, you own them with the one exception being if it was done as work for hire, which if you work for instance at a corporation, some universities actually have those contracts that says basically anything that you write while you're working for us, we own. So if that was the case, you would technically have to get permission from them because they are the rights holders. So if the source material is published, then we can ask, are you recycling the central stuff, the main stuff or not? If not, then we call it generative recycling. Is it ethical? It depends. How much material? Are you doing it in a way that's being transparent with the editors and the readers? Are you recycling some background material or are you recycling results? Is it legal? It depends. Is it, will it infringe copyright of the country in which that reuse is taking place? Copyright laws vary from country to country. It also depends on the contracts and I'll talk about that in a moment that when you sign a publishing contract, usually there's some implications for what you can reuse. Yes, for the folks back home. Yeah, sorry, so my question is about the way that you can apply for different parts, for example, for a paper. So it is not the same recycling from a method section that recycling for, for example, the main idea of the results. So that is my point because sometimes you have two papers and you are doing exactly the same, following exactly the same methods. So how can I distinguish it there between recycling or not my methods and the ideas are new but not the methods? Right, so that's a problem that's increasingly recognized, right? Clearly since the beginning of like modern scientific writing, right? If we went back 400 years ago, 500 years ago it would be different, right? Like when Galileo wrote something he did not look at the prior paper and then say, well, I'm doing this part exactly the same, right? They were writing essays basically. But in modern scientific writing people have certainly been recycling material for generations. Nobody paid attention to it until authenticate, right? Once we got plagiarism detection software then these editors are getting something that says there's a match here. And then it's like, okay, ring the bell we have to do something, right? It's like, oh, it's the same people we'll call it self-plagiarism but there was no way for them to really guide us to think through it. So what I'll tell you for instance and this is what we're trying to do. So for this project is to bring some sanity and consistency of expectations. So for instance, the journal Anesthesiology which is one of the top journals in anesthesiology a year and a half or so ago because of the editor of that journal knew about our work and was following our work revised their author guidelines to say you can recycle whatever you need in the methods, right? That's like call that and realize like this is dumb, we don't want people just changing this just to change it and people need that information. Okay, adaptive publication. So translations, putting a piece in a blog or something like that that's still the same heart of it. Is it ethical? It depends. Is it legal? It depends. So ethically, it's really a matter of transparency with the editor and with readers, right? So if it's been published before the editor should know that it's been published before, right and readers should know that's not the original publication. Legally, if you're translating a work you're basically taking the entire thing, right? The fact that the language is different does not mean that you can just reuse that material. That still holds to rights, right? Otherwise anybody can just take a book by anybody else and publish another language and not have to pay rights for it. So you would need to actually get permission from the prior publisher in order to publish a translation legally. And then finally duplicate publication. It's rarely ethical, it's rarely legal. Probably the only place that I know of where that happens is occasionally something will be published identically in multiple journals. We had that actually when we released our model text recycling policy recently it was published jointly by the Council of Science Editors Journal and it's European equivalent, right? But it says in both there's journals that this is being published in both those places. I'm gonna skip through that just time-wise here. So let's talk just briefly about legal issues. So copyright laws are different by country. There are some overlap and some consistency through some international conventions but they're not identical. The US in particular has something called fair use. Somebody you probably heard about that. For fair use there's a four-points test basically that's used that has to do with is there market harm? Is the right shoulder of the original losing money because of it? How much overlap and is the material recycling the heart of the work or not, et cetera? So my colleague David Hansen and I did an analysis of recycling in US copyright law and what we wanted to know was when people recycle, right, we're not worried about the situations where they're like trying to fool somebody into a duplicate publication, right? That's just basically cheating. It's gonna be illegal. It's unethical. That's easy, right? But what about like the PNS paper or your example? We're like, okay, we're reusing a big chunk of methods in our new paper. Does that violate the copyright laws in this country or not? And what we found was it does not that the kind of standard ways that researchers are likely to recycle from one article to another would be considered a fair use by the four tests. And so what we did was try to think of what would be the largest amount that most people would ever likely do? And we said, okay, imagine that in a paper you recycled half of your methods or half of the background section and that was what we used for our benchmark test. And that's where our analysis shows if you're interested in it, you can go to our website, see our white paper on recycling in U.S. The other issue is contract law. So contracts oftentimes explicitly or implicitly bear on text recycling. Sometimes they will say things like authors are allowed to reuse up to 250 words of their publications and a new publications. Or I think for the American Chemical Society it's 500 words and figures your tables. Others say you can recycle whatever you want but not between articles. Don't ask me why. Others like Elseviers has actually a pretty generous one that says like you can recycle half of your stuff to do kind of whatever you want with it. As long as you're not recycling it into something that's explicitly for profit. So you put in another academic article, we're not making any money on that. Okay, so you should know what's in those contracts. We're working on the legal end and we actually are in the process of revising right now an opinion piece called Legalized Text Recycling for the Journal Learned Publishing where we're making the argument that it doesn't actually cause market harm. The kind of recycling we're talking about you recycle a few paragraphs of methods. Journals make their money from subscriptions not from selling individual articles and even if they did, anybody who's interested in that first article has probably read it by the time the second one comes out and even if they didn't there's just a good chance that they would draw attention to it rather than it's not competing with it. And it's been going on forever. We also know that because text recycling is so common any publisher that would likely bring an infringement lawsuit would have hundreds of cases in their own publication that people could then sue them for. No one's gonna sue over this. So the concern over legal risk for like you need to change these sentences in the method section for copyright infringement is pretty much nonexistent. It's people who are well intended but misinformed who think that they're gonna stay out of trouble by having people rewrite stuff. But what we're hoping to do is get publishers to put statements in their contracts that say you can recycle what you need to recycle as long as you're following the ethical guidelines. That is take it out of the ambiguity of legal stuff that most people don't understand and say what kind of recycling you're doing are you doing in a way that's transparent and fair and open and honest and if you are let's not worry about the legal stuff. So we'll see. Okay, so best practices. So here's a snapshot of our guidance. So first of all we want people to understand that text recycling, a neutral term, it may be ethical or unethical or desirable or not or legal or not, it depends on the situation. How do you do it ethically? Author should recycle text where consistency of language is needed for accurate communication. So we've words met these things to death and gone through advisory board and reworked them and reworked them. And I and my two colleagues who developed this decided we needed to protect authors who from basically well intended but not well educated editors that they could have something to point to and say, look this stuff and the methods, it's the same here. We need it to be the same language for clarity and put that in this language so they can say we were told that we should do that. Now, there are other situations where it may not be necessary for communication but for practicality for not just wasting your time. So authors may recycle text as long as it's accurate and appropriate for the new work. That's important because one of the reasons that people would say oh we don't want people recycling is they think, I don't know if there's any evidence for this, you take this description from a prior paper, you put it in your new paper but actually it's not quite accurate for the new paper. I know from my wife who's a family practice doc that this is a big problem in medical notes that people will say oh we're just copying the stuff from the prior note into the next note but things have changed, right? So we don't want that happening and of course that it doesn't infringe copyright or violate publisher policies. So basically if it's ethical and it's legal and it's appropriate, you should be able to do it. Authors should be careful not to recycle text in ways that might mislead readers or editors about the novelty of the new work. So I think that's probably obvious what it means. The other thing though that's important is how you represent it on your CV, right? If it's a translation, it should be clear to the people who are reviewing you, promoting you potentially, et cetera, that this is not a distinct another work, it's just a translation. Or this piece is largely based on this other thing that I did, it's just been changed some to make it accessible to a different audience. So, okay, the legal stuff. So for most unpublished work, authors hold copyright, you can recycle from there without restriction, again assuming it's not work for hire. Most publishers require authors to transfer copyright to the publisher. This isn't universal, in my experience it's still probably 95% true for most of us in most of our fields, right? Not true for the PLOS journals, for instance. Authors' rights to recycle from their own published works are then limited by copyright laws which differ by country. That's a drag and that's complicated, okay? Here's a couple things that I think are important. One is your contract may actually say you're allowed to recycle some stuff. Go see what's in your contract and if it says you can recycle up to 500 words, you only need to recycle 400 words, you're legally fine. You still need to be transparent with the editors and your readers but you're legally fine, okay? The other thing and this is what's kind of a surprise to us to realize, wait a minute, there's an easy way around this issue is if the editors or the authors are concerned that the amount or kind of material that they're recycling may infringe copyright or be a problem for contracts, just get permission. You all know how to do it, it's what you do if you want to reuse a figure, for instance, from some prior work, right? So we already have a protocol for this. So rather than editors telling authors you need to rewrite that methods or that part of the background to disguise it so authenticate doesn't flag it, so we don't get sued, no. Write it the way that needs to be written to be clear and if you need to get permission, just get permission to do it. So transparency is the key. Be transparent with editors by letting them know when you submit the piece that some of that material has been recycled from prior works and give them the citations of the prior work. Don't wait for them to run it through authenticate and then say, oh, you've self-pleasured your eyes and then have to have that conversation. And you also don't want it to be a situation where something is recycled, they didn't catch it, it goes in, now they have a fit about it and now you have to have conversations about possible retractions or stuff like that. And those things have happened. Okay, and then with readers, be transparent with readers by including some notice that says some of this stuff has been recycled for some previous work, right? If you're transparent with your editors and you're transparent with your readers, you don't have to worry about having been unethical. You've addressed the potential ethical issues, right? You need to also address the legal issues, but when you disguise it or ignore it is when you may run into problems. So I'm gonna share with you just some examples of how people have made this kind of disclosure to be transparent with readers recently. So here's a one piece from Science Advances. You can see in the blue highlighted place here. While the Shishop project is constantly changing and evolving, many of our procedures and methods become fairly standardized following the best practices for text recycling. They've nicely referred to our work and greater transparency, we acknowledge much of the section we use as texts that have been published in previous studies, right? Nobody's being fooled here, nobody's being tricked. We're doing the thing that we've always been doing. We're just gonna tell people that's what we're doing, so we'll have to worry about it. Here's another example similar from the supplement. I'll just let you glance through that. And this is from a BMC health publication about bariatric surgery. We previously published a study from the overall project, information needs of patients undergoing bariatric surgery, and a previously published study interviews were conducted with bariatric surgeons. The introduction of the present paper is based on the introduction of the previously published study. Because of the overlapping methods use, for example, recruitment, we adapted the methods to use previously published study following the guidance about the Text Recycling Research Project, right? So basically what they've done is like, we're just gonna put a note in the article telling people we've done this. When we were first developing our model text recycling policy, I thought, and I think we thought, we were gonna make a specific recommendation for how this should be done in the journal to try to make that easy for everyone. It's like, just do it like this. And after having the conversation with our advisory board, we learned that's not gonna work, because journals have different kind of infrastructure. Some of them, like you can put another section called text recycling or whatever in there, some you can't. Some of them are gonna want it in a footnote, so it's like, we don't need to micromanage that, leave it to the specific editors or publishers to figure out what the mechanism should be, get editors and authors to agree that this is something that would be valuable to do. Now, my guess is, in many of the cases in the kind of recycling we're likely to do in our work, people would say, I don't care, you recycled that method, of course you did, I do the same thing, but due to authenticate, this stuff is now getting flagged and being brought to editor attention, and so now it's becoming a deal, right? And so, this is at least ways that we can say, everybody calm down, don't worry about it, you can do what you need to do and make your writing good and not spend your time coming up with synonyms and rearranging clauses, just do it transparently for readers and editors and things should generally be fine. Okay, quick note about authorship. So as I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges within STEM fields and medical fields is that authors usually overlap from one paper to another out of a group and are usually not identical. So, if you had three authors on your previous paper and one new author and one different author, you could reasonably go to the author who's not an author of the new paper and ask for permission, say, hey, we wanna recycle some of this stuff. I can't imagine anybody saying no, if they're disgruntled that way, you wouldn't do that before you went and asked them. If your authorship team has 100 people or in some fields in physics like particle physics, I think the current record for number of authors on the paper is around 5,000 for a particle physics paper, right? You can't say, we've got this piece of equipment, we've been developing and testing for 20 years. Here's our description of it, but we could only get permission from 3,000 of the people, so we're not gonna recycle it, right? That would be nonsensical. And those descriptions actually go through, like they have boards, groups of people within those authorship groups who's like, we're gonna figure out the language for this and that's the language we're gonna use, right? You have to recognize they need to reuse that exact same language. And so we say, if it's reasonable to get permission from the other authors who aren't represented, do it, but at least get permission from the lead author, the PI, so it's not just being done kind of out of sight. That's that. Quick note here, these are documents that are now available on our website, best practices for researchers, so that's kind of what I just walked you through. Then we have two documents that take you more into the like, what are the issues, why did those issues come up, the terminology and things like that. One for researchers, one for editors, our white paper on US copyright law and fair use and then most recently our model text recycling policy. All right, that takes us to two. Some of you may need to go to your two o'clock things now for the rest of you if you wanna stay for a few minutes for questions, I'm happy to do that. I have one question for you. This might be getting a little into the nitty gritty but I often get this one from my students. So if you go to an international or national meeting and you have a poster that has been accepted by that meeting, it does that run you into copyright? Right, so there's two issues there. One is a copyright issue and one is an ethical guidelines issue, right? The copyright thing, if it hasn't been published, right, and so we can talk about that for a second, then you wouldn't have a copyright problem. Where you get into that confusion is for instance, in many fields, they have conference proceedings and in some fields, like in engineering, the conference proceeding is a kind of pseudo journal article but not the final destination and those like the professional societies will explicitly say, hey, we invite you just to revise your conference proceedings article into a journal article. It needs to be at least 25% different or something like that. In other fields like computer science, the conference proceedings is, that's what the final thing is. So there's nowhere to go from it, right? So recycling from one of those to another, you have to know the norms within the discipline to know what's gonna be ethically acceptable and then the question is like, were the conference proceedings, were they published or not? And that gets into kind of murky stuff which is a lot of the murky law around this which is why we would like the publishers to say you can recycle what you want in the future, right? As long as you're from our stuff or into our journal, as long as you're being ethical about it and not making people try to figure out things they can't reasonably figure out. But the other thing I wanna note is when we did our interviews with editors, we asked them about like originality. And so pretty much every journal will say the new publications need to be original works, right? We're not publishing something that's already been published. And then we would ask them, what do you mean by original? Some of them would say, it needs to be making a new intellectual contribution. And if some of the text overlaps with the previous text, that's fine, but it needs to be an intellectually distinct thing. But we had some editors who said, everything needs to be new. You can't reuse prior paragraphs because that's not original. And for instance, if it was on a blog, it's out there, it's published enough, we won't accept it, right? Now, what are those based on? Hunches, largely, right? Personal beliefs about what counts as a publication or not. Should it count of the fact that it was on your blog as a previous publication? And of course you get into preprints. And so when we were setting up our guidelines and our policies, we realized that there were a couple of things for which we cannot make blanket statements. So one was, what are you allowed to do with preprints? And we say, see the publishers, rules for that, right? Some publishers are fine with preprints. Some will not publish something if it's out in a preprint. And some now will require you to have it in a preprint before you actually submit it, right? So talk about crazy land. So that's one thing. Another one is, for instance, with dissertations and articles. So we learned, for instance, like in engineering where I did my PhD, my dissertation was like a lot of them, it was the articles that I published put into a kind of tied together into a narrative whole, right? Psychology tends to work differently. They tend to do the reverse. They'll take their dissertation and split it into subsequent articles more like someone in the humanities would generate a book from their dissertation, right? So even those norms were different by discipline. Now, do we have time for one more question? There is? All right. Thank you all. Thank you so much, Carrie. Thank you.