Journal Y received an original article for review, which was subsequently published online.
The editorial office was then contacted by Professor Y, not included in the coauthors’ list, who referred to research abuse in the article and requested its retraction. In particular, Professor Y presented a careful evaluation of the article available online, finding that more than half of the presented data had been collected in their own laboratory, more than four years previously. Professor Y reported that the first author of the article was introduced to the laboratory for a specific project, however, the author did not complete the project and left the laboratory, which decided not to publish the uncompleted data. Despite this decision, the author submitted the uncompleted data to another journal and Professor Y removed their own name from this work. Allegedly, thereafter the author merged these previous data with a new project and submitted this joint work as an original article to Journal Y.
Knowing this process, Professor Y contacted the author’s supervisor, asking for retraction of the article. No response was received. Professor Y then reported the correspondence to Journal Y, along with a document highlighting the similarities between the final article and data obtained in the laboratory. After this first claim, three authors listed in the paper published online by journal Y requested to be retracted from the author list, claiming they were not informed about the publication. Journal Y reviewed their peer review process and was unable to identify any critical issue or scientific misconduct. However, both parties were asked to clarify the issue of data ownership and paper authorship with all of the persons involved and to produce a formal declaration, with the agreement and undersigned by all persons involved. In particular, the journal proposed one of the following options: leave the paper published as it stands, change the list of authors, publish an erratum, or withdraw the paper.
The author agreed to prepare a letter with appropriate documents to clarify these issues and permissions. No letter had been submitted by the time that this case was taken to COPE. Meanwhile, the article remains published only online and has not been inserted in any final issue of the journal. No agreement between the two parties has been reached and there is no proof of data fabrication.
Question for COPE Council
- Should this article be retracted?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
COPE has a flowchart covering the request to remove authors after publication. Assuming the authors are alleging fraud/misconduct, the editor should model their actions on the flowchart for suspected fabricated data in a published work. To that end, the journal editor should send a letter to the corresponding author, stating that if a complete response is not received by a specific date (in the near future), the journal editor will contact the author's institution and then, if necessary, the local regulatory body. The institution(s) should be the ones to make a recommendation about the data and authorship, or potential retraction. Until these additional steps have been taken, it is premature to determine if the paper should be retracted.
The editor may wish to go back to Professor Y and see if they can provide evidence that the data were indeed taken in their laboratory—for example, date-stamped institutional logs or original notebooks. If the work was partly done elsewhere, then there would need to be a footnote or acknowledgement of the institution as the earlier affiliation (usually the institution that owns the data) and to thank the earlier research group. It is not clear if the data are the same or are from a re-run of tests using the previous methods. The journal could involve the earlier institution in an inquiry.
The editors have asked the correct questions: 1) who owns and has the legal right to publish the data and 2) who should be an author or contributor on the paper if the data ownership can be sorted. The COPE retraction guidelines state: 'Retractions are not usually appropriate if ... a change of authorship is required but there is no reason to doubt the validity of the findings'
We suggest that improper use of the data would require a retraction if the result of an inquiry is that the author has used the data without permission. In this case a retraction would be appropriate. If there is no response from the corresponding author or the institutions within a reasonable amount of time, a retraction by the editors would also be acceptable on the basis that there is a question about the validity of the data.