Most journals, if not all, profess by the Bible to be against self-plagiarism; yet this curse continues unabated and many authors (in particular, many who have already hundreds of publications) indulge in it. In fact, many authors, who have hundreds of publications, have self-plagiarism to thank for the number of their publications. This contamination permeates the scientific community which knows no means of fighting this ailment.
We first need to define what amount of manuscript content can legitimately be from the author's previous publications, i.e. the threshold between legitimate old content and new (original) content?; 30% old content?
There are potentially many ways to counter self-plagiarism. Some of these are:
1. Depreciation by the scientific community. The main problem here is that so many of the scientific community are themselves involved in this activity to multiply the number of publications. This is self-defeating as mass-scale self-plagiarism deflates the value of publication. What was 100 journal papers 40 years ago, is worth more than 750 journal papers (present target of a university professor) today.
2. Set an upper limit (say 30%) for the amount of content in the current manuscript which is not new, i.e. unpublished. The question here is who will bell the cat? For this approach to be effective, first, the editors have to be free of self-plagiarism. If that can be done, then the more difficult task would be to find hundreds of reviewers who are free of self-plagiarism.
3. Count as one publication in place of "n" publications which are on nearly the same topic and have characteristics of self-plagiarism, by university/research-organisation promotion/selection committees. Fortunately, some universities are trying this approach.
4. Replace the "number of publications" by number of substantial citations in books.
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