2024

We have been approached by the authors of an article published about 19 years ago stating that they have found an error in a mathematical proof in their research. As a result, although the main theorem proposed in the paper should still be true, they would need to completely revise the text and intend in the longer run to find a new proof. They recognise that the paper as published cannot stand and so are willing to have the article withdrawn. 

Questions for COPE Council:

A case report was published in our journal after being approved by a peer reviewer and subjected to a technical review. The first author was a post-graduate trainee attached to the department of pathology of a prestigious national institute.

Two articles published in 2006 and 2008 (by different author groups) had image integrity concerns that have been raised to the publisher. The journal verified independently that these image duplication concerns are valid and reached out to the corresponding authors first and upon not receiving a response subsequently sent emails to all authors multiple times.

Recently, we received a review report from PubMedCentral for the indexing application of one of our journals. Reviewers pointed out several shortcomings of particular articles below:

1. Discussions that did not thoroughly address limitations, and conclusions that were over-stated and/or not supported by the results.

2. Methods that were not described clearly and in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility.

We have received in the past several bribe attempts from authors from an Asian country trying to publish articles in our journal, which have always arrived by email. However, the editor-in-chief of our journal recently received a WhatsApp message on his personal phone number from an author of that same Asian country. The same message was also sent by email to the official email address of the journal and to the personal e-mail address of the editor-in-chief.

This is a hypothetical situation based on a real-life experience.

A set of authors recruited the same patient cohort, collected data with two questionnaires, took one blood sample, but tests were done by two research students for two pathogens, and the results were presented separately in two theses. Subsequently, they sent different papers to two journals. No plagiarism has been identified between the papers.

We are nearing the completion of an investigation into an alleged fraudulent special issue of one of our journals. Someone impersonated legitimate Special Issue editors and invited papers from legitimate authors in the community. We discovered this alleged fraud while reaching out to the people who were listed as the Special Issue editors only to find out from them that they had nothing to do with it.

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).