Over the past couple of years, we have grown increasingly concerned about instances of plagiarism, as well as papers that may inappropriately copy text from the authors’ own work or may, on close examination, overlap too much with authors’ prior submissions. Based on these concerns and some imprecision in definitions and actions, we distributed a survey to elicit the collective opinion of members of our Editorial Board. The paper that follows, authored by Tolsgaard, Ellaway, Woods and Norman is a summary of the survey findings (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-019-09876-7).