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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 219 results
  • 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
    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…
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    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…
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    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

    Submission of article by ghost author

    A corresponding author and two coauthors submitted a paper to our journal. The article was published after due process of reviewing etc. After publishing the paper, a student contacted us to say that the paper was totally derived from their Master's thesis. The journal's Research Ethics Committee heard the case and it was confirmed that the paper had been extracted from the thesis. All the auth…
  • Case
    On-going

    Authorship dispute over image

    A journal published an article on a drug. They also accepted a letter questioning the method used for determination of particle size in the study.  The author of the original article claimed that the image used in the letter was theirs and asked that the letter not be published.   It appears that the two authors used to collaborate. The journal was unable to verify who produced the image…
  • Case
    On-going

    Previous publication cannot be verified

    Publisher A received a concern suggesting that a coauthored paper published in one of their journals had previously been published by the complainant in an industry in-house journal (now disbanded). All three individuals had worked for the company which sponsored the in-house journal. The publisher asked for a contact at the company so that they could request information about their publication…
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    Case Closed

    Editor adding reference to an author's work

    Several years ago Author A was asked by Editor B to contribute an essay to a publication. The book took a long time to complete and underwent many modifications. When the book was published Author A noticed that several edits had been made to the text without Author A being informed and which Author A did not approve. The most notable edit is an added reference to a piece of text. The added ref…
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    Case Closed

    Secondary analysis of medical records and ethics committee approval

    A journal received a manuscript using secondary analysis of existing medical records in which there was no indication that ethics approval was obtained from a recognized ethics review board or that participants gave their informed consent to be included in the study. Instead, the authors explained that the study had been based on a secondary analysis of existing medical records and that no pati…
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    Case Closed

    Post-publication correction because of lack of consent

    An article that has been published in our journal has subsequently been found to have serious ethical issues. The authors did not seek the correct ethics approval from their institution before conducting the research (which involves human subjects). They also did not obtain informed consent from the research participants prior to publication.  The article in question is a case study of a…
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    Case Closed

    Boundaries of duplicate submission

    A paper was submitted to journal A. The reviewers were enthusiastic but raised substantive concerns. The editorial decision was 'reject with resubmission allowed', providing the authors the opportunity to submit a revision if they feel all concerns can be addressed. The authors elected to submit substantially the same report to journal B. The outcome was essentially the same; the paper was reje…
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    Case Closed

    Permission to publish a case report

    A journal published ahead of print a peer-reviewed scientific letter by Drs A (corresponding), B, C, D and E with a description of four patients who underwent a certain procedure. One of the cases took place in hospital X.  Dr C works at hospital X. However, the corresponding author (Dr A) and the other 2 authors (Drs B and D) do not work for hospital X.   The journal received an em…
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    Case Closed

    Reviewer anonymity in post publication peer review

    A journal with an open peer review process (names and reports published alongside articles) accepted an article after assessment by three peer reviewers. Two reviewers were positive and the third reviewer raised some concerns about the methodology. A revised version of the manuscript was published alongside the three peer reviewer reports and the authors’ response   After publicatio…
  • Case

    Registration of a randomised control trial

    Journal A received a manuscript—a randomised, controlled, double anonymous, parallel clinical trial. The manuscript was reviewed by two specialist reviewers who suggested acceptance after revision. One of the important points that was asked was to provide the “registration number of the RCT”. As our journal is a member of the ICMJE, we reviewed the instructions of the ICMJE and found that there…
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    Case Closed

    Controversy surrounding ethics approval

    Journal A received a submission in which the authors conducted a field experiment. The authors noted that at the time of the experiment, ethics procedures were being developed at the authors' institution (institution A) and as a consequence of this, different departments within institution A had their own ethics procedures in place. The authors noted that they followed the procedures of their d…
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    Case Closed

    Disputed change in authorship

    A case control study was submitted to a journal. It was subjected to the usual peer review processes. After the required revisions, the article was accepted for publication. After acceptance, the journal received a letter from the corresponding author (author A) with a request to add the name of a new author (author B). The journal declined, stating that it would be unethical.   The…
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    Case Closed

    Is ethics committee approval necessary for retrospective clinical studies?

    A journal received a manuscript on risk factors for a disease, which had no ethics committee approval or dispensation. The clinical data were collected from the electronic and physical histories of the patients during hospitalization. The authors stated that the study was not submitted to an ethics review board because these data are "secondary." In some countries, this type of research will re…
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    Case Closed

    Plagiarism and copyright of material without permission

    The presenters found an e-book where all of the 'chapters' comprised articles from different issues and volumes of their journal. These were used without the journal’s permission or any form of approval. The journal’s co-publisher neither gave permission nor was contacted. Also, no one contacted the authors of the articles involved for permission.    The journal is open access with…
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    Case Closed

    Using the name of a scientific society inappropriately

    A journal published an article about clinical recommendations for a condition that supposedly was the result of a consensus between two scientific societies of different medical specialties. The article underwent peer review and no problems were identified at that stage. However, about one month after publication the journal was contacted by one of the scientific societies raising concerns that…
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    Case Closed

    Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?

    An article was submitted to Journal A for publication. According to the journal’s policy, the article was scanned using anti-plagiarism detection software, which gave a 17% similarity result. As the journal allows up to 20% similarity, the article was sent for peer review to two reviewers. One of the reviewers noted that the article had been published in a similar form in a conference proceedin…

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