Today's rant is about academic "self-plagiarism". As the Editor-in-Chief of a medical journal, I thought long and hard about this issue. I have concluded that self-plagiarism is a non-existing crime. There is no moral imperative why authors should not re-use their own words.

2. I have been honing my ideas on prions for 25 years, and there is only a limited number of ways to express them. If a journal asks me to review the field, I have no option but to repeat, at least partly, those concepts.

3. And if concepts are unchanged, what is accomplished by paraphrasing? The “self-plagiarism” concept was invented by greedy publishers to secure exclusive copyrights (for free, of course). As authors, we have of course the right to repeat our own words as often as we wish.

4. My only constraint is that (1) republication be labelled as such, and (2) that copyright legislation be respected. But forcing people to paraphrase the exactly same concepts with different words, that may be a useful exercise for secondary school - but not for scientists.

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