- News
Core Practices
…and, most importantly, continually revised library. Within COPE’s core practices is a suite of documents including over 500 cases, 20 flowcharts (in multiple languages), 11 guidance documents, and much more. The ten core practices are: Membership subscription fees
… 51 to 100 £4,248 26 to 50 £2,390 11 to 25 £1,328 5 to 10 £584 Continuous publications Publishing companies that wish to join COPE but do not have a discrete journal product published in intervals…- Case
Question of paper retraction due to proven fabricated data
…errors in the trial call the study’s reliability into question. Provides transcript of relevant court ruling. This makes it clear that the author became an expert witness in February 2007, after publication of paper but before submission of the letter. He clearly became an expert witness on the basis of the study. Transcript says that author acknowledges inaccuracies—11 of 27 patients who originally… - Case
Plagiarism of reviewer's work
Several Europe-based authors, including well known, respected and much published ones, submitted an essay for the journal's section on research methodology. We rejected it without external review as it wasn't making sufficiently new points. We offered to see it again, however, if it was revised and if it added some worked examples using this methodology within published studies. A year l… - Case
Possible overlapping publications/data
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… - Case
Authorship dispute unsatisfactorily resolved by institution
The journal was contacted with a claim to first authorship of a paper currently published online ahead of print. Print publication was put on hold pending the result of the investigation. The claim to first authorship was based on the claimant stating that they had obtained most results published in the paper during their PhD studies under the supervision of the corresponding author, and contri… - Case
Unauthorised reviewer challenges
A paper submitted to a journal with a single anonymous peer review policy was assigned to a prospective reviewer, who agreed to undertake the review. The reviewer then sent an email addressed to a number of different research group and institutional mailing lists calling for volunteers to review the paper. The reviewer attached the PDF of the paper, which had been downloaded from the submission… - Case
Suspicion that signed informed consent forms are forged
…href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36044262/">recent review by PubMed on publishing photographs in medical journals which highlights some of the problems with this, and Sections 4.2.11 and 5.8.3 of the AMA Manual of Style). Overall, however, it seems more appropriate to reject the paper due to concerns about the validity of the consent forms and to inform the authors of the reason… - News
Case discussion: gift authorship
…href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-44015-002.html">The Behavior Analyst Today, Daniel Shabani et al (2004) reported that the 53 most prolific authors in the field of behaviour sciences published an average of 2.9 articles per year between 1992 and 2001; the 11 most prolific authors published 4.2 articles per year. In an analysis of medical papers published from 2008 to 2012, - News
In the news: October-November 2021
…in Russia which sells co-authorship has also been recently identified. In China, funders are penalising researchers who buy fake papers, but there is more to be done to identify and sanction the researchers and the outfits that supply the papers. Data and reproducibility The FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics… - News
Facilitation & Integrity 2023, a year in review
…Errors in analyses, reporting or inaccuracies in published articles (13 cases) Plagiarism (11 cases) Editorial competing interests (7 cases) Authorship disputes (7 cases) Concerns about the handling of responses to published articles (for example, rebuttals, letters to the editor, comments) (6 cases) Citation rings or… - News
In the news: May & June 2022
…science discusses whether peer review has a role in uncovering scientific fraud. Data The Force 11 Research Data Publishing working group has developed recommendations for the responsible handling of cases related… - Case
Plagiarism case
A letter was sent to the editor indicating that three articles (one of them in the editor’s journal) on identical subjects had been published in the same year (2006) by the same authors, accusing the first author of all three articles of stealing data from and plagiarising a previously published article from the academic institution where the first author previously worked. The letter, sent by… - Case
Duplicated gel images
A few months we were contacted by a dean of an institution who informed us about misconduct of one of the senior scientists in that institution. An investigation launched by the institution showed that author A and coauthors reused the same images to show controls in many figures in their different publications. This problem was found in three publications in our journal. We decided to… - Case
Case of figure duplication and manipulation involving two journals
The editors in chief of journal A and journal B, both owned by society C, received a letter from the last ‘senior’ author, also the corresponding author on one of the papers (author D), concerning separate papers published in both journals (paper E published in journal A and paper F published in journal B), informing them that one of the co-authors on both papers is under investigation for scie… - Case
Retraction or correction?
A reader contacted us with evidence that a number of western blots in a manuscript published by us in 2007 had been duplicated from other published papers; in one case, the same gel was duplicated in the paper itself. I compared the original papers and agreed with the reader. Some of the blots had also been duplicated in other papers but all had been published previous to being published in our… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: July 2018
…talked about the value of research transparency (if it has any value) in the absence of properly described and completely reported research. For example, if you don’t know how an educational intervention was actually performed in a study, then what value is there in the article or the data from that study, even if it is made - Event
COPE Seminar 2021
…Members only) Ethical practice in research data publication - challenges, lessons and opportunities FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group, in collaboration with COPE, is developing guidelines and resources to support journal editors, data repositories, and institutions in the handling of ethics cases related to research data. The resources… - Case
The ethics of drug/medication use evaluation audit cycles and publication of the results
We are seeking guidance on the ethical issues surrounding drug/medicine use evaluation (DUE or MUE) audit cycles, particularly with respect to the publication of findings but also perhaps with regard to the conduct of these audits in general. DUE is a quality improvement activity that involves data collection and evaluation (usually by audit), followed by ‘action’ or intervention and a r… - Case
Disagreement between authors and sponsor
Our journal was contacted by a representative of a company following acceptance of a manuscript that was based on a clinical study sponsored by that company. Upon acceptance, the senior author had forwarded a copy of the manuscript to the company, who had identified some discrepancies between the data presented in the article and an initial report that had been presented to them while the study…