Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Republishing the discussion section of a previously published paper verbatim in a new article without acknowledgement.
- Is an instance
Reusing several paragraphs of results text from an article whose copyright was transferred to the publisher, without the publisher's permission — creating potential copyright exposure on top of the publication-ethics violation.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Reusing standardised methods language across papers from the same lab with a citation back to the original protocol publication.
- Not an instance
An author reusing their own prior wording from a work where they retained copyright (no transfer agreement signed), disclosed to the editor at submission — an ethics/disclosure question for the editor to evaluate, not a copyright question.
Editorial commentary
Self-plagiarism, sometimes called text recycling, sits on a spectrum: trivial reuse of methods boilerplate is widely tolerated and even encouraged; substantial reuse of results, discussion, or conclusions across articles is not. The Text Recycling Research Project (Cary Moskovitz et al.) has produced practical guidance distinguishing ‘developmental’ from ‘duplicate’ recycling. Editorial responses depend on whether the reuse was disclosed at submission.
Is self-plagiarism illegal?
Generally, no — and it helps to separate three distinct layers that get conflated in casual usage:
- Criminal or civil law: there is no statute against reusing your own words. Copyright law exists to stop unauthorized use of another party’s protected expression; an author reusing their own prior language is not, by itself, an infringement. The one real exception is when the earlier work’s copyright was assigned away — see below.
- Federal research-misconduct definitions (US): 42 CFR Part 93, the regulation the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) applies to PHS-funded research, defines plagiarism as appropriation of ‘another person’s’ ideas, processes, results, or words. ORI states directly that this regulation does not consider self-plagiarism to be research misconduct, since the reused material originated with the same author. See Research misconduct for the full fabrication/falsification/plagiarism (FFP) definition and how narrowly it is scoped.
- Institutional policy, journal ethics, and copyright transfer: this is where self-plagiarism actually carries consequences. COPE’s discussion guidance and most journal codes of conduct treat undisclosed text recycling as a publication-ethics violation — not because reusing your own words is theft, but because it can misrepresent a paper’s novelty to readers and reviewers, inflate an author’s apparent output, and constitute duplicate publication if the overlap is substantial and undisclosed. Separately, once an author signs a copyright transfer agreement assigning rights in the earlier work to a publisher, verbatim reuse of a meaningful portion of that specific text without the publisher’s permission can become genuine copyright infringement against the rights-holding publisher — a real legal exposure, though publishers overwhelmingly handle it as an editorial matter (correction, retraction notice, or erratum) rather than litigation.
In short: self-plagiarism is rarely illegal in the way third-party plagiarism or fraud can be, and in the US it falls outside the federal FFP research-misconduct definition entirely. But it is routinely treated as a serious violation of publication ethics and institutional policy, with the severity turning on disclosure, the proportion of material reused, and whether it misrepresents the work as more novel than it is.
References
- COPE Discussion Document: Text Recycling (2020)
- Text Recycling Research Project guidance (Moskovitz 2021)
- US Office of Research Integrity, “Self-Plagiarism” guidance page, ori.hhs.gov/self-plagiarism
- 42 CFR 93.234 (definition of research misconduct) and 93.227(b), which expressly excludes self-plagiarism and authorship or credit disputes from the federal plagiarism definition
Also known as
text recycling · duplicate text · redundant publication
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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