Key points Text recycling is the reuse of material from an author's own prior work in a new document. While the ethical aspects of text recycling have received considerable attention, the legal aspects have been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed. Copyright laws and publisher contracts are difficult to interpret and highly variable, making it difficult for authors or editors to know when text recycling in research writing is legal or illegal. We argue that publishers should revise their author contracts to make text recycling explicitly legal as long as authors follow ethics‐based guidelines.