- Event
Retractions and correction of the scholarly record: panel discussion
…Watch; Holden Thorpe, AAAS. Watch live webcast… - News
Dates of future COPE meetings
2011 Monday 7 March 2011 (deadline for cases 21 February) Monday 6 June 2011 (deadline for cases 23 May) Tuesday 6 September 2011 (deadline for cases 23 August) Tuesday 6 December 2011 (deadline for cases 22 November) All Forum meetings are 3–5pm, in the Council Chamber, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, 5-11 Theobalds Road,… - Case
Yet more attempted duplicate publication
A study submitted to a journal was sent out for external review. The reviewer pointed out that it was essentially a shorter version of a paper already published elsewhere. The authors had referenced this paper, but did not make clear that the submitted paper was simply a summary of the other published paper. Nor did they mention the other paper in the covering letter, or include a copy of it. O… - Flowcharts
How to recognise potential manipulation of the peer review process
…authors on submission of their manuscript to a journal; another reviewer who is unable to peer review the manuscript. While there is an expectation that everyone involved in the process acts with integrity, the peer review process can be susceptible to manipulation as discussed at - Event
Annual Scientific Congress of Iranian Society of Medical Editors in association with COPE
…International editors as well as Iranian and regional editors will be present. The seminar is free for COPE members but numbers are limited. For more information and to register, please visit the congress website: http://ismecope.sums.ac.ir Registration will close on 22 October 2011.… - Event
ISMPP European Meeting 2019
ISMPP is offering a 10% registration discount to COPE members for its 2019 European Meeting, Scientific Communications in a Fast-Paced World: Fighting Fit for the Future, 22-23 January, in London, UK. Learn more about the meeting at www.ismpp.org/european-meeting, and enter EU19COPE10 in the “Discount Code” field when you… - Case
Author cannot be located
A manuscript was submitted to a journal and after the review and revision process, it was accepted for publication. However, after the manuscript was accepted for publication, the coauthor stopped answering emails and therefore did not sign the copyright form, or affirm acceptance of the rights and responsibilities of authorship. The journal and production staff tried contacting the coauthor on… Ombudsman's Reports
…the COPE Ombudsman (Download PDF, 26kb, uploaded 22 June 2010). Lessons from a case of overlapping publications Download the report on the case referred to the COPE Ombudsman (- Case
Confidentiality and conflict of interest
A paper reporting an attitudinal study was sent for peer review. The editor received a letter from the reviewer stating that as he was personally acknowledged in the paper, he felt there was a conflict of interest and so unable to review the paper. The reviewer also pointed out that the research in question was part of a larger commissioned project with strict conditions of confidentiality. Th… - Event
COPE Forum: Tuesday 23 March 2021
The 23 March 2021 COPE Forum will be held at 14:00-15:30pm (GMT). COPE Members can now register to attend the March Forum; the deadline to register is Monday 22 March. The discussion topic will be on the subject on publication ethics and books. This will be… - Case
Redundant publication?
…follow-up. The only new feature in the journal A paper is that all the women have a level of index greater than 1 standard deviation below the mean. The journal B study included those between -2.2 and +2.0 standard deviations. There was therefore some overlap of the inclusion criteria in the two trials. The journal A paper does not make explicitly clear whether the women described form part of a subgroup… - Event
COPE Forum: Wednesday 9 June 2021
The 9 June 2021 COPE Forum will be held at 14:00-15:30pm BST (UTC + 1). The discussion topic "When and how to involve multiple journals and… - Research
No study’s perfect: a cross-disciplinary analysis of published errata 2011
…existing studies on errata are small, limited in scope and rather different in methods and aims. We will conduct the first large quantitative analysis of errata published in all disciplines. These will be retrieved and sampled from the over 11,000 journals listed in the Essential Science Indicators database, which classifies journals in 22 broad disciplines. By combining quantitative and… - Case
Wrong version of article published. Should we retract?
The incorrect PDF version of an article was published together with the correct HTML, XML and EPUB versions. The variations between the PDF and other versions are language editing related, and do not affect the scientific value or scientific nature of the article. Questions for COPE Council Given that two version of the article exists, should the journal retract th… RePAIR consensus guidelines
…Responsibilities of Publishers, Agencies, Institutions, and Researchers (RePAIR) in protecting the integrity of the research record The RePAIR Consensus Guidelines emerged from the collaborative effort of a working group from the conference entitled Keeping the Pool Clean: Prevention and Management of Misconduct Related Retractions, held 20-22 July 2016 in Fort Collins,…- Case
A claim of stolen data and a demand for retractions
The publishers received an email from author B about a recently published paper, which passed peer review and had been available online for about a month. In this email, author B claimed that he and another colleague C had determined the peptide sequence in question and had not published it yet, nor given permission for it to be published. He claimed that author A had access to his unpublished… Strategic plan
…href="https://publicationethics.org/cope-strategic-report-2020">COPE strategic report 2020 Page history Page last edited: 16 Feb 2021 Page published: 22 July 2020…- Case
Plagiarism and possible fraudulent publication
An article written by eminent doctors on a subject of great public interest, with implications for public health policy, was published in Journal A. They subsequently wrote to Journal A, indicating that an article had been published in Journal B, which heavily plagiarised theirs. The editor of Journal A wrote to the authors of the second paper, but has received no satisfactory replies. The seco… - Case
Transparency of peer review to co-authors
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… - News
Revised Good Publication Practice guidelines published
The newest revision of the Good Publication Practice” (GPP) guidelines is now freely available (free account registration may be required). The revised guidelines, called GPP 2022, were published on 30 August 2022 in the Annals of Internal Medicine and are the fourth version of GPP, first published in 2003. The GPP…