We received a manuscript for consideration. The manuscript was assigned to one of our section editors who sent it for review. Subsequently, the editor-in-chief received an invitation from another journal to review the same paper. The editor-in-chief recognised the paper straightaway, declined the invitation to review and alerted the editor-in-chief of the second journal of the duplicate submission.
We subsequently emailed the authors of the paper asking for an explanation, especially considering they had confirmed at the time of submission that their manuscript was not under consideration in any other journal. The authors withdrew their paper from the second journal and responded to us by saying that they were very sorry for their “low-level error” in submission and apologised for the occurrence of duplicate submission. The corresponding author claimed that he had entrusted one of the authors to submit it to our journal. Then the corresponding author was away with no telephone access and on his return he found that the paper had been submitted to two journals. He went on to say that his colleagues have access to his e-mail account and so they used his email account to submit to the different journals but he had no knowledge of this. The corresponding author also stated that because the original idea was to submit the paper to our journal, he had revoked the submission from the second journal and apologised to the editor. He hoped that we would still consider his submission. He agreed to standardise the management of submissions and correspondence between his colleagues so that this would not happen in the future.
We are unsure as to how to proceed. If we go ahead with the review of the manuscript, this sends a message to the authors that there are no consequences for their misconduct (whether or not it was an honest mistake). Therefore, we would like to have COPE’s advice on the best course of action. We have put review of the paper on hold.
There was conflicting advice from the Forum. Some suggested rejecting the paper, while others thought it was more appropriate to write a firm letter to the authors explaining that their behaviour was unacceptable. If the author is very junior then sometimes this behaviour is excusable based on inexperience. However, this was not the case in this instance. Some questioned whether the instructions to authors in the editor’s journal make it clear that papers should only be submitted to one journal. Most agreed that a firm letter to the authors and a letter to journal B would be sufficient. The letter to the authors should state that this behaviour is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in the future. It was also suggested copying the letter to the dean of the author’s institution so that the institution could put in place guidelines on submission of papers so that this does not occur again.
The editor continued with the review of the paper and sent the authors a firm letter (copying in the editor-in-chief of journal B and the head of the authors’ institution) stating that their behaviour was unacceptable and will not be accepted in future. In the meantime, the manuscript has been reviewed, and the editor recommended it be revised. The authors have now submitted a revised version which is still under review.