- Case
Unethical private practice
This single author manuscript describes the treatment of 300 women with psychological problems. The women were randomised to either therapy or pharmacological intervention, and this study reports the relative effectiveness of these strategies. At submission, the manuscript did not contain any mention of ethics approval, consent or trial registration. When the author was queried on these… - Case
Ethics approval for survey design
…subjects’ protection information was provided. This is not unusual at the journal when the institutional review board (IRB) or organisation does not provide documents in English. The journal requires an English language translation copy of IRB approval on submission of the revision. After peer review, a revision was requested along with an English translation of the IRB approval letter, the exemption or… - Event
COPE Forum
…unsatisfactorily resolved by institution (JM) 17-12 Potential figure manipulation with corresponding author uncontactable (JM) 17-13 Unhelpful institution report (SS) 17-14 Withdrawal request by an author (LS) 4. Updates 17-09 Lead author Forum agenda and materials - Flowcharts
Responding to whistleblowers when concerns are raised directly
COPE's guidelines as a flowchart on how to respond to whistleblowers when concerns about a published article are raised directly with the publisher or the editor. How should you respond when concerns are raised by a whistleblower about a published article directly via email to the editor or publisher? This could include anonymous or not anonymous concerns about scientific soundness or… - News
Appointment of new COPE Ombudsman
…its members; appeals against COPE rulings or advice relating to complaints against COPE members for not following the COPE codes of conduct for editors and publishers; or if two or more members cannot agree on how to handle a complaint involving both their publications.… - Webform
Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee
The primary role of the Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee is not to adjudicate complaints, but instead to facilitate the resolution of disputes in a manner that is consistent with COPE's mission. PLEASE NOTE: COPE will only consider complaints or concerns… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 11 September 2012: Publishing offensive material
The topic for discussion at this Forum was ‘Publishing offensive material’. Specifically, what constitutes bad taste, indecency or obscenity? How do you deal with expletives (as part of interviews or transcripts)? Where is the line between censorship and freedom of expression? - Forum discussion topics
Coordinating multi-journal complaints
June 2021 When and how to involve multiple journals and publishers in dealing with complaints from whistleblowers Complaints received from whistleblowers can develop into large investigations with multiple journals, editors, and publishers involved. Such complaints may involve many articles from a single author group or multiple… - Case
Fraud or sloppiness in a submitted manuscript
…illustrating the procedure in both manuscripts are identical. The reference list is identical. I can think of only two ways to make sense of this submission: sloppiness or fraud. Under the sloppiness assumption, the authors would have submitted a text referring to their randomised control trial and tables, referring to an earlier observational study. This is conceivable mostly because it is hard to… - News
Case discussion: Possible breach of reviewer confidentiality
…reviewing to their colleagues or students, and this is a breach of confidentiality. There may have been such a breach at any of the other three journals or even during review at grant application stage. The Forum agreed that the editor had handled the complaint appropriately. The editor added that the journal’s instructions were clear about respecting confidentiality and informing the journal if other… - News
Complaints and Appeals focus
COPE’s core practice # 3 recommends that: “Journals should have a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher.” Such complaints can take many forms (there are 133 cases in the COPE case database), some fairly… - News
Revised Good Publication Practice guidelines published
…2022 guidelines provide international ethical and practical recommendations for key stakeholders involved in publishing or presenting company-sponsored biomedical research. Updates reflect developments in the areas of scholarly publishing, biomedical publishing, human trial registration, and roles of publication professionals that have occurred since the publication of GPP3 in 2015. The main… Artificial intelligence (AI) in decision making: Forum discussion topic November 2019
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has advanced steadily over the past several years, and has started to introduce data-driven solutions to many processes throughout the publication process. AI tools can be developed to provide guidance to humans based on relevant data, or AI may lend toward automation of some processes without human intervention. Some processes already being considered…- Case
Potential image integrity flags on 15-year-old published papers
Journals are receiving increasing numbers of requests like this from readers asking for action to be taken on old papers. The difficulty is that the data are often unretrievable (for example, if the author has died), or have been digitised from an analogue format and are very poor quality. In such cases it may not be possible to establish definitively if falsification or fabrication has taken… FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: Sharing of information among editors-in-chief regarding possible misconduct
….1111/%28ISSN%291365-2044/homep...) Discussions with publishers suggest that such sharing of information risks accusations and/or legal claims of defamation, since submissions should be handled confidentially, even though the journals concerned might carry a statement on their website saying that manuscripts and related documents may be shared if that is considered necessary to investigate possible…- Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 4 September 2013: Sharing of information among editors-in-chief regarding possible misconduct
…/editorial_policies.htm">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/13652044/homepage/editorial_policies.htm). Discussions with publishers suggest that such sharing of information risks accusations and/or legal claims of defamation, since submissions should be handled confidentially – even though the journals concerned might carry a statement on their website saying that manuscripts and related documents may be shared if that's considered necessary to… - Case
Duplicate publication in a predatory journal
…article taken down, but have asked the editor to proceed with their journal’s usual review processes. The journal would not normally consider or publish a paper already published elsewhere but have not encountered this situation where a predatory journal has published something against an author's will (and presumably without any quality control, peer review, etc). It is possible that the… - News
FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…Forum discussion topic this month is around Predatory Publishing. Add your comments to the discussion below (non-members also welcome to comment): What are the issues? Predatory publishing is generally defined as for-profit open access journal publication of scholarly articles without the benefit of peer review by experts in the field or the usual… - News
A PLACE for publishers
Over the past few months we have been working with Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to build a hub for publishers with limited resources or little experience, to easily discover resources from each of the… - Case
Unethical research
We have received a study in which patients with healed duodenal ulcers were randomly allocated to treatment with either placebo or ranitidine. Patients were also categorised as to whether they were type A or type B personality; the hypotheses being tested was that patients who were type A might be more likely to relapse. Patients did not have their H pylori status determined. Subjects…