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Where should journals escalate serious concerns about an institution or institutional review board?
A publisher received a submission to one of their journals that raised ethical concerns. The concerns were related to potential harm or undue risk for participants who may be vulnerable. The publisher reviewed the ethics approval statement, and the authors had met the journal’s policy requirements by prospectively obtaining ethics approval from their institution before beginning the rese… - CaseCase Closed
Managing an editor’s undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article
An opinion piece on a polarising political and technological topic was published. A discussion ensued on social media, and shortly after, the publisher received a formal complaint stating that the editor-in-chief of the journal, who had managed the peer review process for the manuscript, had a conflict of interest and should not have made the final acceptance decision. When the publishing team… - CaseOn-going
Data integrity issues
Several years ago, a third party contacted the journal with concerns about data irregularities in two randomised controlled trials published about 10 years ago. Both of the papers were published before the journal had strict requirements on data upload to a public repository and availability. The journal sent an initial email to the corresponding author of both papers (the same author fo… - CaseCase Closed
Academic freedom
A final year student, and two other researchers in law, all from the same university, undertook research into a recent court judgment on the rules in relation to civil servants making public comments. Based on this research, a manuscript was drafted to be submitted to a double anonymised peer reviewed journal. The manuscript is highly critical of the judgment’s reasoning and impact. All three a… - CaseCase Closed
Possible peer review manipulation
A journal received a complaint by one of the co-authors of an article submitted by a research team, stating that one of the reviewers suggested by the corresponding author sent an email to corresponding author asking them to tell them what comments they should insert in their review. In response, the corresponding author asked the co-authors to propose comments to be sent to the reviewer. One o… - CaseCase Closed
Is there a time limit for submitting a critique of a published article?
A letter to the editor was submitted to a journal with a comment referring to a study published a year previously. The reader raised concerns about the study and interpretation of the results. The editors of the journal examined the peer review comments of the manuscript and found that the aspects in question were missed out. The journal sought expert advice from an independent reviewer who com… - CaseCase Closed
Removing a retracted article from a third party site
Journal A published a case report. Following publication, the publisher of journal A was contacted by a representative of the individual depicted in the article stating that, contrary to what the authors stated in the article, consent was not given for the publication. The article was retracted and removed to protect the identity of the individual and all indexing sites were updated. The origin… - CaseCase Closed
Suspicious responses to authorship change requests
A journal received a request for multiple changes to the authorship list after the manuscript was accepted. Originally, there were five co-authors. After acceptance, the journal received the following requests from author A, the corresponding author and co-first author: remove one of the co-authors (author D), add a new co-author (author E), reorder the list of authors, and change the designate… - CaseOn-going
Change of corresponding author after manuscript published online
On submission of a manuscript to a journal, one of the authors was indicated as the corresponding author. During the submission, review, and revision process, and also through copyediting and proofreading, the corresponding author responded to all emails, signed the publishing agreements, and was generally available. At this time, the authors of the manuscript did not mention a possible change… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship dispute involving a commercial institution
A paper was published in a journal. After publication, an associate editor of the journal said that they and other colleagues should have been authors on the paper. They cited a patent they helped write that overlapped with the article as proof that they should be authors on the paper. The authors of the paper refuse to add the associate editor and colleagues as authors. Unfortuna… - CaseOn-going
Request to remove an author post-publication
A paper was submitted to a journal by authors A and B. The paper was accepted and then published in the journal. Several months after final publication, author A contacted the journal asking for their name and their biography to be removed from the article. Author A stated that they wished to distance themselves from the research. Author B also contacted the journal separately to… - CaseOn-going
Deceased author and author delaying publication
The journal accepted a manuscript for publication with two authors. One of the authors died before signing the copyright. This manuscript is now ready for galley proof approval from the surviving author. Proofs were sent to the surviving author and the author who died as normal because the production editor assigned to this manuscript did not know that one of the authors had died. After… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship of a commentary
An associate editor invited a commentary to be written by one of the peer reviewers. When the commentary was submitted, the associate editor was a co-author. There could be the appearance of a conflict in the decision to accept the article on which the commentary was based if the associate editor is an author on the commentary. Question for the Forum - CaseOn-going
Institutions paying authors to be named on papers
Some academic institutions are paying authors for the name of the institution to be included in the manuscript so that the institution has an increased number of publications in a given year. The institution gives the author payment and the author terms it as ‘funding’ or ‘grant’, which is not the case. The author publishes the research article in a journal with two affiliations and explains in… - CaseOn-going
Duplicate submission and request for withdrawal
A paper was submitted to journal A and received a ‘revision’ decision. At some point following this decision, the authors emailed the journal to request withdrawal, citing inconsistencies in their data and subsequent conclusions. A search of the literature showed that the same paper (with the same authors) was published in journal B the day before the withdrawal request. Clearly, the authors wa… - CaseCase Closed
Manuscript submitted based on retracted paper
A paper was published in a journal. After publication, the author contacted the journal to ask for withdrawal of the paper because of some mistakes. After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, the paper was found to be incomplete due to the dependent variable used in the analysis and the literature review used. The paper was re… - CaseCase Closed
Can two DOIs be assigned to the same manuscript?
A preprint server owned by a commercial publishing company posted a paper and assigned a DOI to the preprint. The manuscript was then submitted to peer reviewed journal X, owned by a different publisher. Assuming acceptance at the journal, can the article be published under a different DOI belonging to journal X? At journal X, Crossref registration is automatic. However, can two differen… - CaseOn-going
Unresponsive authors delaying publication
The journal received a submission which proceeded through peer review and was recommended for publication. The authors responded to the revision letter, providing a detailed itemised list of changes and revised their manuscript accordingly. The revised manuscript was subsequently accepted for publication. The normal process for articles in this journal is that when papers are accepted a… - CaseOn-going
Ethics approval and consent
A complainant raised six articles to the attention of the editor-in-chief, with concerns about ethical approval and possible conflicts of interest regarding the way that approval was granted. The studies all involved minority populations. Ethics approval had been granted by the institutions for all of the manuscripts involved, along with written informed consent and corresponding ethics… - CaseOn-going
Author alleges discrimination by institutional report
In 2020, the corresponding author of an article published online three years previously notified the journal of an authorship conflict and explained that the institution was requesting retraction. Because authorship conflict does not typically warrant retraction, the publisher requested further details from the author and the author's institution about the conflict. The author provided two diff…