Includes agricultural sciences/natural resources, biological/biomedical sciences, health sciences including dentistry, nursing, allied health, veterinary science
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 handle this case?
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 should publishers take in cases of such overt promotion of paper mills?
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 reports.
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 conference may bring dismissal from their posts, and also potentially imprisonment.
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.