- News
In the news: April 2021
…with Nous listed has a correction made or is retracted, it may impact co-authors going forward. Instilling a lasting culture of scientific integrity into US federal agencies is promoted as being fundamental to guard against anti-science… - News
Peer review resources
The theme of Peer Review Week 2021 is “Identity in peer review”and will no doubt provide lots of opportunities to learn and share, as well as important food for thought about this fundamental aspect of scholarly publishing. COPE has lots of peer review resources to help you develop good peer review practices for your journal; to recognise when the peer review process may be going awry; as well… - News
Guest article: Avoiding predatory publishers
…manuscript from predatory journal, case, 2016 Predatory publishing: next steps and where do we go from here? Forum discussion topic, December 2020 Submitting a guest editorial or opinion piece to COPE We welcome guest editorials and opinion articles regarding research… - Case
Undeclared competing interests
- In the interests of transparency the authors should have declared a conflict of interest. - The holder of a patent should declare that they hold such a patent even if any profits made go elsewhere, because they stand to derive an intangible benefit from being associated with that patent. - There is nothing wrong with having a conflict of interest, but it must be declared. This allows readers… - Case
Falsification of certificates of deposit of new bacterial species in culture collections
…are viable and are available to other researchers without restrictions on their use for taxonomic research. This evidence takes the form of a “certificate” issued by the culture collection. This system has been developed to ensure that type strains are available for comparison with new strains isolated in the future, and to insure against collections going out of existence and/or changes in… - Case
Inappropriate authorship on students paper
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, wa… - Case
Meta-analysis: submission of unreliable findings
…confusion surrounding the case. Going forward, the editor should consider revising journal policy to request authors to send any related papers under submission to them when they submit an article.… - Case
Authorship dispute
A manuscript was published by journal X and submitted by author A (last author). Author B claims that fraud occurred in relation to authorship for the following reasons. (1) Author A did not take part in producing the data for the paper and has never been a co-author on any version of the manuscript.(2) A paper with very similar content ,which was part of the PhD thesis of author C… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2021: Ethical practice in research data publication - challenges, lessons and opportunities
…href="https://www.force11.org/datacitationprinciples">FORCE11 Data Citation Principles FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group FAIR Principles TOP Guidelines Dryad - Case
Multiple complainants for a single article
…with any errata and updates as a single package. Any further complaints must then address the whole package, avoiding the danger of this becoming a recursive process of addressing essentially the same complaints over and over again. This solution also permits the journal to compartmentalise the different issues: they can go ahead and issue a correction if necessary while continuing to look into other… - Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2022: Managing paper mills
…19:05-33.20 Sarah Elaine Eaton, COPE Council Member, and Editor of the International Journal of Education Integrity, explained the parallels between student contract cheating and paper mills, and how some of what we know about contact cheating can be transferred to our understanding of paper mills.There has been around 15 years of… - News
In the news: July 2021
…-findings-that-are-probably-wrong-cited-far-more-than-robust-ones-study-finds" target="_blank">research published in science, psychology and economics journals that was not affirmed in repeat studies, were cited many times more than those which were substantiated in follow up studies, prompts an interesting discussion about whether science is self-correcting or in fact, going in the wrong direction. Are flashier results the least likely to be confirmed in later studies, getting a less rigorous… - Forum discussion topics
Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”
…be part of a pattern. Back to top Comments from the Forum, Friday 4 September 2020 Note: Comments do not imply formal COPE advice, or consensus In our article submission system, we see strategic changes to the authorship list in papers that we suspect might be paper mills. It seems that they know the journal is going to ask… - News
Guest article: Research misconduct
…issues it handled. This type of research on research misconduct by publishers is rare. The current research culture is a force that makes it impossible to understand the true state of research misconduct while guaranteeing to make it worse. That we can go about our daily lives consuming the products of research without mishap suggests that our trust in science is well-founded for now, but without… - Case
Problem with figures
…similar. I can assure you that all this study is fully controlled and the reproducibility is excellent. We now have even results with the systemic application of the XXX vector to disseminated tumors. I find it hard to believe that I am going to be under investigation questioning my scientific integrity.” (9) We then enlisted the confidential help of an editor from a different journal who is an… - Case
Request for a retraction from a pharmaceutical company
…Chief will then look over the response to determine whether there are errors and/or if there is just a difference of opinion. If the latter is the case, the Editor may suggest the PC submit a formal ‘Letter to the Editor’ on the CAT, which would go through our normal peer review process. The author would then also be given the chance to submit a response, which would also be peer reviewed. We… - Case
Conflicts of interest between authors and editors
Recently, we have received a manuscript submitted by our Editor in Chief (EiC), with almost all of the Editorial Board Members and some of our authors of previous submissions as co-authors. In dealing with this we noticed that some of our previous published articles currently have conflicts of interest between the authors and the Academic Editor (AE). Our peer review policy states that t… - Case
Paper submitted for publication without consent or knowledge of co-authors
…the Forum noted that the editor has a right to ask the author for a copy of this paper. Do the authors want the paper retracted so that they can submit to the other journal (which has a higher impact factor)? If the authors do go ahead with submission of a paper to the other journal, there must be clear linkage to the original paper. There are also copyright issues to consider. On… Common ethical and editorial dilemmas of author misconduct: how should we respond?
…"Evidence of misconduct" "Probably no misconduct" Not applicable 1997 16 11 0 5 1998 33 30 2 1 1999 27 20 3 4 2000 32 26 6…- Case
Unusually frequent submission of articles by a single author
…writes very well”. He could not justify how Mr X could write on such diverse topics. We received only one email reply from a senior professor. He wrote : “I was really shocked to see the paper published without my knowledge. I do not know Mr X (author). I have never met him. He has never worked with me. He has stolen my published data. I am going to forward this message to the ethics department…