alt Hacker NewsDo I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?
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Generally, yes. Journals expect that the research is new. With most research labs (at least in CS) making their work freely available on the internet, the major value of publication is peer review. In my area, double-blind review is the norm, meaning the reviewers and authors don't know who the other is. Thus it's not clear to the reviewers if the prior research is even yours.
The expectation is you cite the previous work to clearly indicate it is not new, and that your submission for review is mostly about new research. In some situations overlap is okay, e.g. there's a conference version and then a journal version with additional results. In that case you disclose in writing what the delta is to the editor (who knows your identity while the reviewers do not). This also means in the paper you have to treat the prior work as if it is by a different group to maintain double-blind review.
The point is to make it clear what is new research. Trying to get credit for the same research multiple times, and boost citation count, is dishonest to the expectations of the community. It's also a waste of time for reviewers (who volunteer) to review same research over and over again after deciding it's acceptable. Think of it like a OSS maintainer getting pull requests for trivial changes to the code just to boost the green squares on someone's GitHub profile. It's a drain on everyone else and doesn't benefit the project.
Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.
It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).
Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The same morons who think that re-using something you have written before in academic work without quoting yourself is (self-)plagiarism for which you should be sanctioned?
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)