Simultaneous Submission of Journal Article: A Serious Author Misconduct

Simultaneous submission refers to the practice of submitting a manuscript that is already submitted and still under consideration at another journal. Almost all journals have a clear policy to not submit any manuscript simultaneously and force authors to send each manuscript to one journal at a time. Despite the set and well-known policy, it seems that the authors are enjoying to breach the publication ethics. In many cases, authors might be hoping to speed up the publishing process by sending out the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously. However, by doing so they actually slow down the overall editorial publishing process by consuming editorial resources from many journals to the same single paper and damaging the whole community. Sometimes simultaneous submissions get detected as they end up with simultaneous publication and sometimes it gets caught by reviewer or editors if by chance the same individual gets assigned by both journals however it's very rare. When such misconduct of simultaneous submission detected editor takes appropriate ethical action however in my opinion such detections are less than 1% of total simultaneous misconducts happening. More than 99% simultaneous submission went undetected and such authors destroying precious editorial resources silently without getting caught. In this article, my focus is on such silent destroyers which can be prevented with a collaborative approach of watching violators by journals and tighten the other policies through which authors easily violating simultaneous submission policy.