Text Recycling in Chemistry Research: The Need for Clear and Consistent Guidelines

Legalize text recycling

“…Contracts actually play a much larger role in governing authors' rights to recycle their own work: most authors sign publication agreements, and these private agreements often restrict how authors can reuse their own work in ways that go beyond the controls imposed by copyright law. These contracts are frequently unclear—sometimes explicitly and sometimes indirectly addressing text recycling, with little consistency from one agreement to another (Moskovitz, 2021b). Even in the case of open access publishing, which now accounts for millions of articles each year and a nearly a third of all research article output (Piowar et al, 2018), publishing agreements can still impose significant restrictions on author reuse that apply outside of the permissive Creative Commons licences that those works are made available under.…”