The practice of sound editorial standards places an ethical responsibility on scientific editorial boards to publish original texts, ensuring academic integrity and authenticity. Originality refers to the condition of a work that has not yet been disseminated and has led to the adoption of criteria to prevent redundant publication, a practice that compromises the credibility of science.
However, the way editorial teams apply the criterion of originality has resulted in the rejection of articles derived from theses and dissertations available in institutional repositories, characterizing them as self-plagiarism. This issue has been discussed in graduate programs and coordinators’ forums, yet without questioning the similarity criteria used by journals. The real consequences of this stance call for urgent reflection and a clear position.
Repositories were created to make the intellectual output of an institution available to both the institution itself and society as a whole. They serve to record, preserve, and broadly disseminate this output in Open Access, materialized in various documentary formats. Imposing barriers to the full content of theses and dissertations constitutes an incoherent and regressive interference in information and institutional memory policies aimed at the dissemination of scientific knowledge. It distances us from the principles and concrete actions that uphold knowledge as a public good that should be accessible to society.
Therefore, Abrasco, through the Forum of Public Health Journal Editors, understands that rejecting articles based on textual similarity with theses and dissertations available in institutional repositories undermines Open Access policies and delays the dissemination of research — much of it publicly funded — that could contribute to addressing social, economic, and cultural problems, especially in peripheral countries.
Given the social relevance of the information and Open Access policies embodied in institutional repositories, it is important to ask: what do students, professors, researchers, information professionals, managers, and society as a whole gain from such restrictions?
Rejecting articles derived from theses and dissertations available in repositories contradicts current trends in scientific communication, which encourage the sharing of manuscripts as preprints (versions released before peer review) and the structuring of theses and dissertations in article format.
Such restrictive practices drive authors toward fast-track journals that do not conduct peer quality reviews — many of which are predatory — and impose high financial costs on authors and institutions. Moreover, the practice of embargoing theses and dissertations until articles are published disregards the distinct nature and circulation of these document types: an article does not make a dissertation obsolete, nor vice versa, nor does it diminish its value. In this sense, the coexistence of diverse documents and forms of thematic and descriptive representation of scientific knowledge is affirmed.
Our commitment as scientific editors to transparency and to unrestricted public access to knowledge, as reflected in the deposit of theses and dissertations in institutional repositories, should lead us to adopt alternative measures. Journals can and should:
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encourage authors to disclose the theses and dissertations from which the article originated, ensuring transparency and facilitating access to the full research context;
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adopt originality criteria that recognize that the full availability of theses and dissertations in repositories does not nullify the academic value of a derived article;
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and align with open science and open access practices, rejecting actions that weaken repositories or promote exclusionary publishing models, such as predatory journals.
Based on these arguments, Abrasco, through the Forum of Public Health Journal Editors, takes a stand against editorial practices that hinder the deposit of academic outputs in institutional repositories, as such practices compromise the democratization of knowledge, encourage predatory journals, and contradict the principles of open science. We defend the free dissemination of theses and dissertations — far from being a hindrance — as an essential part of best practices in research, education, and the social impact of science, all of which are foundations of scientific communication.
Finally, the journals associated with the Abrasco Forum of Public Health Journal Editors, in alignment with the above recommendations, commit to incorporating them into their editorial policies and practices.
Rio de Janeiro, 26 June 2025
Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva – Abrasco
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