The next COPE Forum will be a face to face meeting at the INANE Conference in Boston on 8 August,1.30-4.30pm. All COPE members are welcome to join this Forum in person, whether or not you are attending INANE. It will follow the usual format where members' cases are presented for advice and a Forum discussion topic.
On 25th May, an update to the 1993 Data Protection Act will come into force. This is known as the GDPR. You have probably heard of it as most of the websites, apps and services that we all use on a day-to-day basis are updating their privacy policies and sending out notices like this one.
On Friday April 27th, Sense about Science, Voice of Young Science and SAGE Publications hosted a workshop for early career researchers to find out more about peer review.
COPE Council Member Michael Wise was an invited speaker at the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors 2018 Asian-Pacific Conference, which was held on 27-28 March 2018 at the Novotel Singapore Clarke Quay.
An article in HealthNewsReview.org discusses a paper published in the BMJ which was widely picked up in the news, but where the peer reviewers had close affiliations with the authors, and wonders if there are wider unexamined conflicts of interest in peer review.
COPE’s Core Practice #4 on conflicts of interest / competing interests states: “There must be clear definitions of conflicts of interest and processes for handling conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers, whether identified before or after publication”.
Included in the news this month are articles related to April's theme of "Complaints and appeals”, together with authorship, code of ethics, retractions and preprints.
“Journals should have a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher”. This refers to COPE’s Core Practice #3 and it is good advice and might be the only advice you need if all human beings operated solely with agreed upon objective and rational principles and facts.
