An article was submitted to Journal A for publication. According to the journal’s policy, the article was scanned using anti-plagiarism detection software, which gave a 17% similarity result. As the journal allows up to 20% similarity, the article was sent for peer review to two reviewers. One of the reviewers noted that the article had been published in a similar form in a conference proceedings. The reviewer sent us the article downloaded from the conference website highlighting the overlapping paragraphs, which was nearly 80%.
The journal wrote to the authors asking for an explanation. The authors stated that they had submitted an abstract of their work for participation in the international conference. The abstract was accepted on the condition that they submitted the whole article. The author submitted the article but on the condition that it would not be published in the conference proceedings as the authors wanted to have it published in an indexed journal with an impact factor. Two emails were sent on this subject, copies of which the author provided to the journal.
The authors had no knowledge of the publication of the article as the conference organisers did not inform the authors. After the response from the journal, the authors wrote to the conference organisers asking them to retract the article from their website. The conference organisers are not replying to the emails from the authors.
COPE advice
This would appear to be a case of duplicate submission, and whether the authors knew it or not is irrelevant. It seems the authors did not have a reply from the conference organiser about their initial request for non-publication. If the conference did not reply and they continued with the abstract submission, the conference policy still holds. Perhaps the journal can clarify if the authors received a reply from the conference. If not, they should not retract the paper from the conference proceedings, and it cannot be republished in the journal.
If the research is so good and the authors admit to naivety about publishing in the conference proceedings, the journal could consider asking the authors to resubmit their paper after paraphrasing and adding additional original content. The conference paper may be preliminary data only and could be developed substantially. Some journals allow this practice after authors have cleared copyright with the conference (or can show they kept the copyright) and reference the first publication. The journal could consider it as a new submission and with full referencing to the prior conference paper.