An observational study submitted to an institutional journal was sent for peer review. The authors were invited to submit a revision six months later. They did so, but had not responded fully to the reviewers' points, so they were asked for further clarification of their selection criteria, publication plan, and evidence of ethical approval. A paper by the same authors describing the same cohort had been published in another journal, and there was considerable overlap.
It then transpired that the study had no formal ethical approval, which the authors justified by saying that their institute had no ethics committee, the study involved no intervention as such, and that they had voluntarily adhered to their country's medical research council guidelines for research on human subjects.
A request was sent to the funding body, a branch of the journal's institution, to clarify the procedure by which a study with no ethical approval had been funded, in obvious breach of the institution's stated policy. The reply indicated that the protocol had not been reviewed by the appropriate committee, and that the principal investigator had been funded through a temporary contract. The paper was then rejected. The authors appealed, but the editorial committee decided at a subsequent meeting to uphold their decision.
- How should an institutional journal's editors investigate such a procedural lapse when it has occurred in their own institution?
- There was a question of what the journal should do with the information.
- Take the issue to the institutional ombudsman.
- Send the paper to the journal’s ethics committee.