2011

A known expert in a certain content area was asked to review a manuscript. He asked if one of his trainees (not a content expert) could review the manuscript instead, with some oversight and as a training exercise. He stated that he would provide the trainee with a full explanation of confidentiality. The section editor replied that it was the particular expertise of the invited reviewer that was being sought. The invited reviewer agreed to review the manuscript. Subsequently, the reviewer contacted the section editor, stating that his trainee had reviewed the manuscript and felt the manuscript should be rejected; the reviewer also read it and concurred, suggesting that the editor reject the manuscript as poor science (my words), but did not include a detailed review. The section editor pushed him to return a detailed review, which he has now done.

My question is: is giving this manuscript (not blinded, ie, author names and affiliations are evident) to the trainee a breach of confidentiality on the part of the reviewer? If so, what steps do you recommend taking?

Last March we accepted a paper written by a post-doctoral fellow (PD) and an assistant professor (AP). The work was done by PD in AP's laboratory; PD has now moved on (to another country, in fact). Soon after the manuscript was sent to production, AP sent an email asking to delay production of the manuscript because AP was worried that there may be an ‘error’ in the manuscript that might require ‘some adjustments’. Months passed with no further word from AP. A few weeks ago, I wrote to AP regarding an update. Last week, AP replied, asking to remove his/her name from the manuscript because AP and PD “... have an insurmountable scientific disagreement over how the data for this study should be tabulated and presented”.

AP called yesterday to provide some additional background. AP believes that PD made some questionable decisions with respect to the data and AP is unable to replicate the findings in his/her own analyses of the data.

AP's university looked into the matter and found insufficient evidence to pursue a claim of scientific misconduct. According to AP, PD interprets this to mean that PD has done nothing wrong.

I have not yet said anything to (or heard from) PD. I am certainly not comfortable in moving forward with this publication. Yet, without knowing more details and without hearing PD's side of the issue, it would seem unfair to PD to withdraw our decision to publish the paper. And, anticipating what PD might say ("I did everything correctly"), I find it hard to imagine how we can adjudicate the issue.

Recently, as co-editor of my journal, I received a manuscript submitted for publication. The author had recommended two reviewers along with their Gmail accounts and affiliations. I was curious about the affiliation of one of the reviewers. I looked this person up and discovered they had a different email address than that provided by the author. So I used
the email address that I found to contact the reviewer (reviewer 1). For the second recommended reviewer (reviewer 2), I also looked up a current email address and used the one I found instead of the Gmail address that was provided by the author.

Reviewer 1 responded with the comment that the title of the manuscript looked similar to a manuscript review that he/she had been asked to confirm for another journal (journal 1). Reviewer 1 asked me to contact the editor of journal 1. After contacting the editor of journal 1, I discovered that the author had provided bogus email accounts for the recommended reviewers.

The editor of journal 1 became suspicious of the reviews when he received a review within hours of the request to review the manuscript. It was at this point that the editor of journal 1 discovered that the email addresses provided were bogus.

Reviewer 2 declined my request to review the manuscript. To test that the Gmail provided by the author was bogus, I sent a request to review the manuscript to reviewer 2’s bogus Gmail account. Within hours I received a review. I then called reviewer 2 to confirm that he/she had not provided a review. He/she had not, and was very concerned that a Gmail account was created using their name.

In summary, this author has been creating false email accounts for suggested reviewers which are going to unknown individuals who are providing reviews under false pretences and giving inaccurate information as to their identity and affiliation. The outcome of this is that my fellow co-editor and I have banned this individual from publishing in our journal. The author has also been banned from publishing in journal 1. Does COPE have any additional advice on this case?

An article was submitted for publication. This was a survey of research activity in a specialist area and included, among other things, research funding amounts from each institution. This led to a sort of 'league table'. The information was provided by the responding director of the specialty area or head of school/research group of each institution. The cover letter stated this is for research purposes. No particular ethics approval was sought for the study as it was based on staff/professionals and most were known to the principal author.

The question is whether these data on amount of funding are private or public. While grant income data can be available in funders' websites/reports or the institutional/departmental websites, certainly it exists in Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) reports that are available to the public for past research, this may not be the case for all research grants (ie, industry grants or private donations).

Is research grant income classified as private data (in which case, consent is needed) or it is public data and the cover letter to the study means that returning completed questionnaires implies consent?

In May 2011 a letter from the Vice-Rector for Personnel of a reputable university was sent to the editor mentioning that two articles published in the journal contained two statements not supported by documented evidence. The two statements related to: (1) approval of the local ethics committee and (2) representation of the experimental evidence.

With regard to point (1), the authors stated in the article that they had approval in 1995 for their research protocols but the authorities state that there is no written documentation of this agreement and that this cannot substitute for formal approval of the research. The journal and the university rules indicate that formal approval of an ethics committee is required.

With regard to point (2), a statement in both articles cannot be sustained for one of three patients in one of the articles and for one case in the second article. Laboratory analysis revealed contradictory evidence from the authors’ statements in the articles. The authors gave three reasons why they ignored this information. Unfortunately, the samples kept in the authors’ laboratory were destroyed in a fire.

According to the letter from the academic authorities, “the authors have been kept informed of these facts, which are in breach of the rules of good scientific conduct”.

One of the articles is coauthored by three colleagues from another university. They have asked the journal that their names be removed.

The author of the articles, who received a copy of the letter from the Vice-Rector, asked to have some time to send in his rebuttal of the accusations. For both issues the answers provided by the authors were submitted to the university and were judged as unsatisfactory.

Long discussions within the publications committee of the journal with representatives of the publisher and the scientific society led to the decision that an “expression of concern” should be published. Prior to publication, the expression of concern was sent to the authors and the university for their comments. Just before the deadline, a letter arrived from the university (signed by the Vice-Rector and the Rector). The conclusion of the letter was that the university believed an expression of concern was not needed. The university believed that the authors recognized that they made mistakes in relation to both issues but since they acted “in good faith” the university had closed the case and did not consider an expression of concern appropriate.

So the journal was faced with an author admitting two serious “mistakes” in two articles. The institution that originally raised the concerns backed off in the end. After consulting with the editorial team I wrote to the author asking him to send a letter to the editor signed by all authors correcting the serious mistakes in the literature. A confidential draft letter was received from the author, and edited and completed by the editor so that both issues were mentioned. This letter was signed by all authors at this author’s institution. Three authors at a different institution refused to sign the letter as they believed that the letter to the editor did not clarify the situation. These three authors confirm their initial position and encourage the other authors to retract both articles. A copy of the email correspondence between the author and a spokesman for the other institution indicates that the author does not want to do this.

A possible conclusion would be to publish the letter to the editor signed by the authors from the institution of the first author as well as a letter to the editor from the three authors from the other institution. This would be accompanied by an expression of concern or an editorial by the editor, highlighting the necessity of proper ethics approval and reporting all experimental data.

An additional question to COPE: should other editors be informed of this? In a sister journal, an article was submitted mentioning the same very outdated ethics approval.

A cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study which was a final year student's project was submitted as an original article to our journal on 30 April 2011. On initial review it was obvious that it was conducted by students and written by them, but the list of authors had the supervisor as the first author, followed by 13 students.

The supervisor, who was also the corresponding author, was questioned on authorship criteria. If it was the supervisor’s project and the students had helped, then why were there so many students listed (13 in all)? If it was the students’ project, which is a requirement of their curriculum, then why was the supervisor the first author? He/she should be acknowledged only.

The authors decided to withdraw the article on the grounds that they wanted to send it to a foreign journal. We obtained the signatures of all of the authors and closed the file.

The same article was resubmitted as a new article on 29 August 2011. The declaration that it had not been previously published was sent to our journal on 5 September 2011. No change had been made in the names of the authors. The signatures of the students were a photocopy of the original ones submitted previously. Apparently the supervisor thought that the journal office would not be able to associate this article with the previous submission.

The journal believes it would be useless to explain the authorship criteria to the supervisor as apparently he/she is eager to have another article on their CV. The students are the ones who suffer.

What steps should the journal take, particularly with regard to the false authorship?

As editor-in-chief of a journal (journal A), I was contacted by an individual (N) who indicated the following: authors of an article published in journal A were questioned as to the similarity of a figure and a table appearing in both journal A and in another journal (journal B). N noted that reanalysis of the data of the published work by the authors suggested errors and inconsistencies of the similar data across journal A and journal B.

Subsequently, N provided additional details, including notice of a third journal (journal C) that appeared to have published a table similar to those in journals A and B. The editor of journal B responded to this saying that although the authors had been contacted by the editor of journal B and a response from the authors was pending, they agreed that retraction from journals A, B and C was required. Of note, journal B had previously resolved a challenge from N with respect to the study in question as a letter to the editor regarding data interpretation with a response from the authors. The editor of journal B shared both of these publications with the other journals involved at the request of journal A.

Although the authors referenced journal B in the article they published in journal A and stated that it was an extension of the study published in journal B, they only indirectly referenced the figure and table. The figure and table did not include a reference or acknowledgment to indicate where they were initially accepted/published or submitted elsewhere. Hence it appears that a very similar figure and table appeared in three publications and a figure in two publications without appropriate assigning credit.

This appears to journal A to be a possible case of overlapping publications by the authors. Taking the first publication dates (including Epub dates) on PubMed, it appears all three articles were published at around the same time, with the article in journal C publishing first as an Epub article.

It should be noted that the authors retained the copyright to their article published in journal B. I am not sure about journal C.

Most recently, N sent another email to all three journals questioning the housing conditions of the animals used in the study and whether the statement indicating that the authors had received approval from their ethics committee of experimentation on animals is actually true.

As editor of journal A, I forwarded all the information to my publisher. I plan to contact the authors on review and after discussion with COPE. My publisher has also informed journals B and C of our plans to contact COPE before taking any initial action.

As well as asking for guidance on how best to handle this case, we would like COPE’s opinion on which journal should be taking the lead to resolve these concerns, as it involves multiple journals.

An associate editor of one of our journals has asked whether we can configure our online peer review system to restrict access to reviewer correspondence to corresponding authors. His concern is that some of the review materials (eg, a harsh critique) might be embarrassing for the principal investigator if accessed by a co-author who was a junior investigator or laboratory technician. Similarly, he thinks that a cover letter that requests exclusion of reviewers could be embarrassing to the principal investigator if read by certain co-authors.

Our editor in chief is not convinced by this editor’s arguments and prefers transparency to all co-authors. He suggests that the principal investigator should explain to junior co-authors that scientific publishing is similar to making sausages—the process is a little messy but the final product is usually good.
Is there any consensus as to whether all co-authors or only the corresponding author should be permitted to access review materials?

This case involves four manuscripts. Three of the manuscripts were originally published in another language and then published in our English language journal. There is overlap in the authors who were involved in all four manuscripts.

The first and second manuscripts were duplicated publications from another journal. The evidence is very clear. The papers were published in another country in another language, and then in English. A native speaker of the other language was able to read both versions and found only minor differences, and the editor of the foreign language journal also did this, and recommended that our journal retract the papers. The authors checked the box on our submission form that indicated that the submissions had not been published elsewhere, and they made no mention of any previous publication in their covering letter.

For the third paper, which shares authors, we had no evidence of duplicate publication until we heard from the editor of the foreign language journal who said that it came from two other articles. However, the editor did not say in which journals these were published. Again, the authors checked the box indicating that the paper was original and had not been previously published.

For the fourth manuscript there is no evidence of duplicate publication, but it shares one author and is therefore included. The editor of the foreign language journal did not find a duplicate publication.

Two authors are in common on the three duplicated papers. The paper for which we do not have evidence of duplication has different authors for the most part, but one of its authors is also an author of two of the duplicated papers. To try to make this clear, the authorship of the four papers is as follows, where each letter indicates an author:
1) A, B, C, D
2) A, B, C, E
3) A, B, F, G, H
4) C, I, J, K, L

The editor in chief of our journal wrote to the authors (A, B, and C) telling them that they had violated international standards against duplicate publishing and received an email in reply from a supervisor at their institution, apologising for this.
We seek guidance from COPE on how to publish a retraction in our journal concerning these four manuscripts, or is another course of action more appropriate?

Our journal (journal A) received a complaint from a 'Clare Francis' alerting us to a case of duplicate publication involving our journal and another (journal B). The article in journal A was published first, but submitted after the article in journal B. Clare Francis requested that the article in journal A should be withdrawn as it is duplicate publication. However, the article in journal B was an extended abstract, included in a section of selected conference proceedings. Our records do not go back far enough to check whether the authors informed us of this but they did not reference their abstract in the article in journal A. The article in journal A is a full paper, with a materials and methods section, detailed results and enough information for someone else to replicate the experiment. The extended abstract in B was not. When we contacted the editor of journal B, we were informed that they had received several such complaints from Clare Francis which have turned out to be somewhat spurious.

A simple Google search revealed that 'Clare Francis' is a widely known self-styled whistleblower in scientific publication.

We responded that we had looked in detail at both papers and did not consider it to be a case of duplicate publication, and that we considered the matter closed. Clare Francis did not agree, and reiterated the issue of the article submission timings, insisting that the paper be withdrawn, and seeming to ignore the substance of what had actually been published. 'She' appealed to our status as a member of COPE as a reason that we should take on board these concerns.
We believe not only that using a pseudonym to pursue these matters is unethical, but that we have followed the correct procedure and have made the correct decision regarding these papers. We would be interested in hearing if the Forum agrees (on the former points, if not the latter).