Case report.
Two authors submitted a case report that was interesting but not written in the style of the journal. So the editor suggested that the authors rewrite the case report and resubmit it. They did so within a week. The case report was sent for review, accepted and published.

Subsequently, the department head of one of the authors wrote to the journal stating that the case report had previously been published in a non-English language journal, and that he was also an author in that publication. The authors wrote a cover letter for each submission. Both cover letters stated that the case report had not been submitted to any other journal. They were sent after the case report was published in a non-English language journal. The authors were contacted separately by email and asked to explain the discrepancy. They were warned that unless a satisfactory explanation was provided, the journal would have to retract the case report.

COPE advice.
There are grounds to retract the article. However, since the documents were in different languages, a "notice of republication" would have been more appropriate. There are two problems here: (1) the author's problem with the names on the two papers and (2) the problem of duplicate publication. There may also be copyright issues regarding the first journal. The advice was to write to the author's institution, but not in this case to the head of the department, as he may be impartial. It was suggested that he write to the dean of the university and ask him to investigate.

Resolution of the situation
The authors wrote that the previous publication was not scientific. They said that the journal had no editor, no reviewers, and no signed copyright agreement. They sent us a copy of the instructions for authors and highlighted the sentence "keep in mind that you are not writing a scientific publication", which led them to conclude that the journal was not a scientific publication.

However, the journal is a well-known journal in its country of origin. It has an editor. It is indexed on PUBMED, as is the original publication of the authors. The statement about "not writing a scholarly publication" seemed to refer to the section, not the journal as a whole: moreover, it was contained in the "style guide" section, and thus seemed to be intended to encourage clear writing. The article was therefore withdrawn.

Source: https://entc.com.ua/uk/1968-podviina-publikatsiia-v-neanhlomovnomu-zhurnali