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COPE Members bring specific (anonymised) publication ethics issues to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice. The advice from the COPE Forum meetings is specific to the particular case under consideration and may not necessarily be applicable to similar cases either past or future. The advice is given by the Forum participants (COPE Council and COPE Members from across all regions and disciplines).

COPE Members may submit a case for consideration.

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Showing 1–20 of 776 results
  • Case
    On-going

    Handling conflicts of interest between authors and Academic Editors

    Recently, we have received a manuscript submitted by our Editor in Chief (EiC), with almost all of the Editorial Board Members and some of our authors of previous submissions as co-authors. In dealing with this we noticed that some of our previous published articles currently have conflicts of interest between the authors and the Academic Editor (AE). Our peer review policy states that t…
  • Case

    New case

  • Case
    On-going

    Retracting a 'Just Accepted' article

    We are nearing the completion of an investigation into an alleged fraudulent special issue of one of our journals. Someone impersonated legitimate Special Issue editors and invited papers from legitimate authors in the community. We discovered this alleged fraud while reaching out to the people who were listed as the Special Issue editors only to find out from them that they had nothing to do w…
  • Case
    On-going

    Same cohort - same blood samples - multiple tests

    This is a hypothetical situation based on a real-life experience. A set of authors recruited the same patient cohort, collected data with two questionnaires, took one blood sample, but tests were done by two research students for two pathogens, and the results were presented separately in two theses. Subsequently, they sent different papers to two journals. No plagiarism has been identif…
  • Case

    Plagiarism by a possible predatory journal

    An article published in a journal in 2023 appears to have been plagiarised in a possible predatory journal but the publishers are unable to get a response from the predatory journal or affiliated Institute.  The article (Article A) was submitted to Journal X in 2022 and published early in 2023. The authors reached out to the Journal after finding that another article dated from 2021 (Art…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Potential image integrity flags on 15-year-old published papers

    What should a journal do if an old (more than 15 years old) published paper is flagged on PubPeer for image concerns, but the case cannot be resolved due to the time lapsed? For example, if only low quality images are available online that cannot be analysed conclusively; some of the key authors may no longer be contactable; the raw data is no longer available; an institutional investigation is…
  • Case
    On-going

    Request for removal from author list for reasons of religious belief

    We have been contacted by an author of a published article who has requested to be removed from the author list. The author is third in the author list and is neither a lead author nor a corresponding author. The CRediT statement for the article reports that the author’s contribution to the work included investigation, validation, formal analysis and data curation. The author says that t…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Suspicion that signed informed consent forms are forged

    A research paper was submitted to our journal and underwent several rounds of peer review and editorial curation. We were on the point of acceptance when we realised there were some images that were submitted along with the paper where patients were perfectly identifiable but we did not have the signed informed consent forms. We therefore asked the authors for the consent forms (corresponding t…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Handling undisclosed peer reviewer conflict

    Some authors from a company recommended a peer reviewer on submitting their manuscript, who was then asked to review the manuscript. This reviewer recommended acceptance without change. One other reviewer recommended major revision (a methodological reviewer not a content expert) and the third reviewer recommended rejection. The editor found it unusual for a review to recommend acceptance witho…
  • Case
    On-going

    Author retracts request to be removed from author list

    An author of a coauthored article published in our journal ten years ago contacted the outgoing editors with a request to have their name removed. The author in question is Dr A of University 1 and they are the paper’s first author. Their stated reason for doing so was that they had recently discovered errors in a table in the paper. The second author on the paper, Dr B, provided the original d…
  • Case
    On-going

    Author refusal to sign an ethics form

    A journal has received a submission which is based on patient data (CT scan images). The data have been found to have been taken from an open-source repository. The authors are refusing to sign an Ethics Approval and Consent for Authors form. Questions for the Forum Is a signature in these cases compulsory? How would the Forum recommend we hand…
  • Case
    On-going

    Reviewer citation manipulation

    This is a general scenario which has been observed in increasing numbers at our journal. We are finding that some reviewers provide a referee’s report which include a request to cite a number of papers, which on closer inspection are all authored by the referee. We would like to hear whether Forum participants have any policies or procedures for reviewers who are clearly manipulating cit…
  • Case
    On-going

    Concerns over the withdrawal of a complaint

    The journal received multiple complaints from two ‘whistleblowers’ in country A regarding the methodology presented in an article published in 2021. The Editors began an investigation into the paper, using evidence provided by the whistleblowers. The Editors felt that based on the provided evidence, an investigation should be carried out. The authors, who were also from country A, were made awa…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Request for retraction due to alleged ethical misconduct in a grant application

    A journal received a request from University A for a published paper to be retracted, citing ethical issues with the grant application submitted by an author from University B. The journal is satisfied that the rigorous editorial processes required by the journal were followed prior to publication and asked for specific details of the ethical breach; evidence that all authors on the publication…
  • Case
    On-going

    How to handle offers of promotion of authorship for sale

    We have been approached via email by a company promoting authorship for sale. The email describes the service as providing 'co-authorship' of an existing article that has been submitted for publication in an indexed journal. The articles cover a range of disciplines and the company claims a high success rate for publication. Question for COPE Council: What steps sho…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Complaint over protocol used in special issue

    We launched a Special Issue (SI) focusing on the application of a particular clinical protocol, with guest editors that have an extensive clinical history in applying this protocol. This specific protocol is currently used and promoted by a small subset of practitioners, with limited wider recognition. The SI concluded with a substantial number of published articles, including several case repo…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Ukrainian authors request retraction of article published in Russian conference proceedings

    A journal has been contacted by a group of authors from Ukraine who wish to retract their article because of acute ethical issues in relation to the war with Russia. The authors are employees of a research institute in Ukraine. When preparing their article they were not fully informed about the country of the organisers of the conference. They are concerned that participation in a Russian confe…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Balancing Anonymisation and Open Science during peer-review process

    As an editor of a journal with a double-anonymous peer review system, I often wonder about the right balance between open science practices and anonymisation of the manuscript for the review process. How much anonymisation is enough while being compatible with open science dissemination? In particular, when a manuscript includes information about the protocol registration and raw data, s…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Should we allow pseudonymous authorship?

    We are handling a manuscript that is now ready for acceptance. During the review process we noticed that one coauthor had the surname "999" and this coauthor and two others had the affiliation "Independent researcher". We asked the corresponding author what this meant. Their answer was that the names of two of these three authors, including "999", were pseudonyms. The paper was based on a compe…
  • Case
    On-going

    Rescind a decision post-acceptance prior to publication

    A paper that has been accepted for publication in a journal has recently been found to be unsuitable for publication. The authors have been highlighted in other journals for disseminating misinformation regarding the treatment of COVID-19. An expression of concern has been issued on another article, similar to the one we are close to publishing, in another publisher's journal. We looked into th…

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