Duplicate Submissions
The STM Integrity Hub includes a cross-publisher/journal duplicate submission checker. Participating publishers send submitted manuscript data to the hub (automated by the submission system) and stored until a reject, withdraw, or accept signal is sent to the Hub, indicating that the manuscript is no longer under consideration. With each submission, there is a check for active matching manuscripts. If a match is made, alerts are sent to both publishers. For RUP, the alerts go to the email addresses checked regularly by the managing editors as well as to integrity@rupress.org. After receiving one of these messages, the article in question should be immediately placed on hold while the initial investigation takes place.
The emails will look like the ones below (note that each duplicate alert is also in the STM dashboard at https://publisher-vztrri.hub.stm-solutions.org/duplicate-submissions. If you have access, you would have received a password. Your username is your email address. The dashboard will show whether the other publisher has taken action). The highlighted text in the email screenshots below (Figs. 1 and 2) indicates whether the submission to RUP was the matching submission (the second submission that triggered the duplicate alert) or the first submission (with a later submission to the other journal triggering the alert). In either case, it is against RUP policy (see JCB, JEM, JGP).
Matching Submission
In the case of a matching submission (the second submission in sequence that triggered the duplicate alert), after placing the manuscript on hold, an investigation with the other publisher is warranted to ensure that a reject signal has not been missed. You can contact the other publisher by clicking the publisher name as indicated by the green arrow in Fig. 1. When contacting:
Share the author list to help confirm that it is indeed a duplicate submission.
Ask whether the submission was rejected and when.
If the other publisher rejected the manuscript before it was submitted to RUP, we may proceed with manuscript processing, as this is a false positive duplicate.
If the article is still under consideration at the other journal, this is a confirmed duplicate, and the submission should be withdrawn, with an indication to the author that we have detected that the manuscript had been submitted elsewhere.
First Submission
If the RUP submission was the first submission (with a later submission to the other journal triggering the alert).
Check the EJP status to confirm whether or not we rejected the paper. If it was rejected, it is probable that the reject signal never made it to the Hub. Go to the dashboard and select: "False Positive...." (see Fig. 3).
If the paper is still under consideration by RUP, an investigation with the other publisher is warranted to ensure that it is a true duplicate. You can contact the other publisher by clicking the publisher name (as indicated by the green arrow in Fig. 2). When contacting:
Share the author list to help confirm that it is indeed a duplicate submission.
If the duplicate is confirmed, alert the handling Scientific Editor or Executive Editor (AE in the case of JGP or JHI) and the manuscript should be withdrawn, with an indication to the author that we have detected that the manuscript had been submitted elsewhere.
Below is the STM suggested workflow.
Duplicate Submission Template Flowchart_RUP-Dec2024.pdf