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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.
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Author displays bullying behaviour towards handling editor

Case number: 
20-08
Case text (Anonymised): 

A handling editor rejected a paper without review, after consulting with a senior editor. The corresponding author sent an appeal about 2 weeks later where he requested that the paper be given a second chance and be sent for peer review. He added that, in case of a new decision to reject without review, the editor should provide a detailed response to a number of questions and comments raised in the appeal letter. He also mentioned that, in order to illustrate the importance of the study, he had done a social media poll asking whether the paper in question was more relevant to the journal’s readership than another paper whose link he provided in the poll and that had recently been published in the journal. The appeal was also read by another senior editor and it was agreed to reject the paper again without providing any detailed explanations as the behaviour was considered borderline bullying.

Three weeks after the second rejection, the corresponding author contacted the journal expressing his disappointment with the decision and threatened a freedom of information request to access the correspondence between the editors that led to the editorial decision. Moreover, he suggested he would be writing about his negative experience with the journal.

The handling editor perceived this as aggressive and litigious behaviour and shared the correspondence with the head of the research section of the journal, who responded to the author and copied the senior author in the correspondence. The senior author responded by acknowledging the inappropriate behaviour of the author and promising to take action internally.

Question(s) for the COPE Forum

  • Did the journal handle the case appropriately?
  • Could something else or something different have been done?
  • How can this type of situation be prevented?
Advice: 

The Forum agreed that the journal behaved appropriately and handled the case correctly.

In terms of what the journal could do for future situations, the COPE Audit stresses the need for an appeals process, and that the process is clearly described in the author guidelines or on the journal's website. The journal might wish to look again at their instructions to authors and include a statement about the editorial decision making process in the appeals process, stating that the associate editors make recommendations to the editor, if appropriate, and that the final decision rests with the editor. The journal might also wish to add prominently to the author guidelines that the deliberations and decisions are, in general, confidential, and that any specific enquiries would have to requested formally by a lawyer. 

The Forum suggested that in retrospect, perhaps the journal should have involved the other co-authors, given that it was the corresponding author who made the threats. It is possible the co-authors may not have been aware of the corresponding author’s threats. 

Also, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible that after the author had done the social media poll, and was asking for more detail, it might have been possible to de-escalate the situation by giving more detail on why the appeal was declined.

Another suggested approach was to look at this from the point of view of a difficult personality with misdirected enthusiasm, someone who does not understand the process well, but is engaged and enthusiastic, who might respond to direction and education from the journal.

Resolution: 
On-going
Year: 
2020
Classifications: 
Authorship and contributorship
Authorship
Authorship
Questionable authorship practice
Complaints and appeals
Misconduct/questionable behaviour
Misconduct/questionable behaviour
Misconduct/questionable behaviour (author)

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

  • 26 February 2020

    Update to the pdf re: subject areas included in the broad categories, and a category name. Changes as follows:
    Page 26: the Humanities category should include the subject Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (currently under Information Sciences on page 27)
    On page 27: As above, the only subject in the category Information Sciences should now be Library and Information Sciences
    On page 31: the category called Libraries and Information Technology should be Information Sciences (the n 22 is correct).
    FI, the numbers are correct, just the category subjects/ and name need amending.

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.

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