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Complaints and appeals

Journals should have a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher

Our core practices

Core practices are the policies and practices journals and publishers need, to reach the highest standards in publication ethics. We include cases with advice, guidance for day-to-day practice, education modules and events on topical issues, to support journals and publishers fulfil their policies.
Read more about core practices

We set out to ask:

•Are AHSS editors aware of COPE and how can we best communicate our services to them?
•What issues are they dealing with that are problematic and what do they need in terms of support?
•What is COPE not currently providing?

Respondents were asked to report issues that were most widespread and frequent:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.4.1

In early 2019 COPE, with the support of Routledge (part of the Taylor & Francis Group), commissioned primary research with Shift Learning to better understand the publication ethics landscape for editors working on journals within the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

About this resource

Author Developed by COPE Council with support from Routledge (part of the Taylor & Francis Group) and Shift Learning
Version 1 August 2019
How to cite this
Exploring publication ethics in the arts, humanities, and social sciences: A COPE study 2019 https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.4.1 

Our COPE materials are available to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Non-commercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works —
You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. We ask that you give full accreditation to COPE with a link to our website: publicationethics.org

Full page history

News

Case discussion: Suspected plagiarism

Case 19-04 Suspected plagiarism

A single author submitted a paper to a journal. A similarity check revealed 48% similarity with another published paper. The published paper was by different authors—5 in total. The similarities between the papers were in the introduction, methods and discussion sections. The submitting author did not reference the published article.

At the 2019 COPE North American Seminar, Rebecca Kennison, from K|N Consultants, presented details of a project which 

"seeks to foster greater awareness among humanities scholars and editors about ethical issues in philosophy publishing…. [It] acknowledges that research and publication ethics in the humanities are in many ways, and for good reasons, complex matters and that, unlike in the sciences, there have not been  broad efforts... to make existing expectations and practices explicit and to develop shared best practices across various subfields and disciplines.'

About this resource

Full page history

  • 12 June 2019

    Added body text

News

Case Discussion: Editor and reviewers requiring authors to cite their own work

In this case, a staff member at a journal noted that a handling editor and her or his favorite reviewers frequently requested authors to cite the editor’s  and reviewers’ work in revised submissions. Once this was confirmed, the editor-in-chief consulted the editorial board who agreed that the requested citations were not scientifically necessary.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.24

A guide detailing the suggested approach to the organisation of the Editorial Office in order to comply with COPE’s Core Practices.

About this resource

Author Developed by COPE Council
Version 1 October 2018
How to cite this
COPE Council. General approach to publication ethics for the Editorial Office. Version 1. 2018 https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.24

Our COPE materials are available to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Non-commercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works —
You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. We ask that you give full accreditation to COPE with a link to our website: publicationethics.org

Full page history

  • 23 May 2019

    First version October 2018

Introducción a la Ética de la Publicación

News

In the news: April 2018 Digest

Included in the news this month are articles related to April's theme of "Complaints and appeals”, together with authorship, code of ethics, retractions and preprints.

News

Complaints and appeals

“Journals should have a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher”. This refers to COPE’s Core Practice #3 and it is good advice and might be the only advice you need if all human beings operated solely with agreed upon objective and rational principles and facts.

News

COPE Education Subcommittee focus: Complaints and Appeals

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 common and straight forward, others less so.

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