I'm confused, as I've never delved much into the nature of journals short of what we had to in college. No, I never published a paper. Hopefully someone can explain/answer my question.
Do the publishers (somehow) force the authors to give them exclusive publishing rights or something? If not, why are these authors simply not putting their papers on multiple journal/platforms?
A few comments
1. Authors have a choice of where to publish and there are now many journals that are fully #openaccess. I only publish in such journals when I have a choice.
2. Back when I published this paper, there is little if any discussion of such issues in the Biology community. It just did not occur to me that this would be an issue.
3. Some journals allow one to post preprint versions of papers on preprint servers. In some fields (math and physics) this is common. In others (e.g., biology) this is rare. But we know do this and there are efforts (e.g., BioRXiv) to make this more common.
Publishing in multiple journals is heavily frowned on (and most journals will not republish work irrespective of copyright) since it is normally done to (a) boost publishing records and give the impression of greater productivity (CV padding) & (b) increase the authors' citations (i.e. the impact of the work) & (c) add undue weight to a hypothesis, by increasing the apparent number of papers that support it.
However, this is not a barrier to including papers in institutional repositories etc, simply to publishing in multiple journals.
In math, at least, these transfer-of-copyright forms are increasingly allowing by default posting of (final submitted—see juretriglav (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194544)'s link for the importance of this modifier) papers to the arXiv, or even just to one's web page. This seems such an elemental freedom now that it can be hard to remember that it wasn't always the case. I remember, but can no longer find—does anyone know the source?—a post a while back from an academic who asked (probably) Elsevier for permission to post an article on his home page, and was denied it, and who then essentially dared them to sue him for posting it anyway.
Whenever I've been published, I've asked to retain copyright and that has been granted -- I'm not sure it's a grant, though, since it's mine to start with. The usual negotiating starting point is a contact from a publisher that automatically claims copyright. I simply delete that clause (and possibly insert "The author retains copyright", so that there's no doubt).
Clearly, that's not happening here and I don't understand why, unless publishers are refusing to publish without being given copyright. In which case, alarm bells should be ringing very loudly.
It's not about handing over copyright but it's generally agreed that publishing multiple copies of the same work is a bad thing. This is typically done by researchers to boost their paper count (+ a bit of self-citation), and can make a hypothesis seem better supported than it is.
So only dodgy journals will re-publish work that has been published elsewhere.
Do the publishers (somehow) force the authors to give them exclusive publishing rights or something? If not, why are these authors simply not putting their papers on multiple journal/platforms?