==== Front
Ann Saudi MedAnn Saudi MedAnnals of Saudi Medicine0256-49470975-4466King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre 10.5144/0256-4947.2007.304asm-4-304LettersReply Cathey John T. Senior EditorAljurf Mahmoud MDEditor-in-ChiefJul-Aug 2007 27 4 304 304 Copyright © 2007, Annals of Saudi Medicine2007This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
==== Body
Dear Dr. Afifi: Thank you for raising an important issue and providing the data on duplicate publication in the region. In response to your comment about our policy, our decision to ban all authors on manuscripts submitted to the Annals that are found to have been previously published is based on an assumption that all authors partook in the study and were aware of the original publication and the second submission. If they later convince us that their names were placed on the new submission without their knowledge, we may remove them from the banned list. As you say, they could be innocent. In searching for possible previous publication, we rely initially more on the title and abstract than on author names. When different authors appear on the new submission compared with the original publication this suggests that new authors were not involved in the study reported in the first published version of the manuscript, raising the issue of contributorship in addition to duplicate submission. Presumably their contribution to the study was not sufficient to warrant inclusion in the original list of authors. We have to assume that all authors on the new, duplicate submission were at least aware of the previous publication, unless they convince us otherwise.