There’s coverage in the Times Higher Education  of a paper on the perception of academic credit among academic chemists in the US, published in the journal Accountability in Research in July 2010.

There’s a new post at the Scientist about differing practices among journals on the signing of editorials. The piece only discusses biomedical journals - among those relatively few journals have ones just signed by the journal; more and more are signed directly by the authors and some (like the journal I work at) does something in between. We’d be interested to hear what journals at COPE do, especially those outside of biomedicine – are there differences in tradition according to the journal's speciality?

The New York Times just posted an interesting story of how a group of scholars in the humanities are experimenting with open peer review. The experiment is happening in the Shakespeare Quarterly in a special issue on, appropriately, Shakespeare and New Media.

A recent item on the site of the Report on Research Compliance (run by the National Council of University Research Administrators)  discussed the longstanding vacancy at the head of the Office for Research Integrity in the USA.

All too often the efforts of editors to expose misconduct in research and publication come to nothing because the authors' institutions either ignore the problem or fail to act on it.

 The August issue of European Science Editing (the EASE journal) contains an interesting article by Mary Ellen Kerans and Marje de Jager about how manuscript editors can detect plagiarism and help authors avoid it. The article includes helpful definitions of problems such as copy-paste writing and micro-plagiarism. 

European Science Editing 36(3):62-5

www.ease.org.uk

COPE Vice-Chair, Sabine Kleinert has reported on the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore and COPE’s involvement in developing international standards for authors and editors in a Lancet commentary.

Two US journalists have created a blog about retractions (http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com). They argue that retractions are an important mechanism for correcting the research literature but may not be easy to find or well-publicised.

A paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week looked at associations between the funding sources of 546 registered trials of drugs in 5 commonly prescribed classes and published outcomes, using data from clinicaltrials.gov.

PLoS Biology has just published a paper and an editorial on an initiative to improve the reporting of studies that report research that involves animals - the ARRIVE guidelines.