- Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Retractions, a publisher's perspective
Session on retractions at the European Seminar 2019, chaired by Heather Tierney, COPE Council, with a publisher's perspectives from Catriona Fennell, Director of Publishing Services, Elsevier. During the session we also heard from Howard Browman and Thed Van Leeuwen. Links to their presentations are below: Howard Browman, COPE Council, with the - Seminars and webinars
North American Seminar 2019: In the aftermath of authorship violations in philosophy
Michael Dougherty, Professor of Philosophy, Ohio Dominican University speaks about authorship violations in philosophy including: using pseudonyms in philosophy and how to avoid post-publication pseudonym surprises. why we should be concerned about plagiarism, types of plagiarism in philosophy and what are the options for whistleblowers? What editors and publishers… - Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Plenary on predatory publishing
Perspectives on predatory publishing and thoughts about solutions with Deborah Poff, COPE Chair.… - Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Text Recycling Research Project
Text recycling research project session chaired by Mirjam Curno, COPE Council and presented by: Michael Pemberton, Georgia Southern University. Professor of Writing Linguistics, Director of the University Writing Center, and Editor of Across the Disciplines. "What do gatekeepers across academic fields believe about appropriate text recycling practice?" Cary Moskovit… - Seminars and webinars
WCRI 2019: Preprints and their place in the publication ethics landscape
While preprints have existed in some disciplines for decades, preprints and preprint platforms are becoming more and more common across the entire landscape of publishing. The total output from preprints remains low in comparison to published journal articles, however, preprints are growing rapidly across many disciplines. Preprints also offer some interesting questions and potential concerns o… - Case
Publishing complications and patient safety
Journal A is dedicated to communication about practical treatments related directly to patient and personal experiences. These ongoing discussions have been part of this specific medical profession for the past 50 years and journal A is a platform for these discussions. Regarding new treatments and new developments, permission from the local medical ethical commission is mandatory as wel… - CaseOn-going
Authorship issue related to misleading action of one author
Our journal received a manuscript which was a report of an evaluation and enhancement of an online clinical decision support system (CDS) for a specific population at risk of a disease. The online CDS had been developed by a national agency with a mission to support health promotion and disease prevention activities. Evaluation of the CDS was supported through contracts and sub-contracts. The f… - Case
Withdrawal of paper at proof stage
An original paper was submitted to our journal. After peer review, the authors were requested to revise the paper, and the revision was submitted back to the journal. Our manuscript editor accepted the paper. The paper was scheduled for publication 3 months later after copyediting was completed. We informed the corresponding author about acceptance of the paper and sent them the typeset… - CaseCase Closed
Deceased author
After a manuscript was accepted, an author passed away before they could complete the conflict of interest statement and copyright transfer documents. The publishing company requires that all authors complete these documents prior to publishing. The other authors do not want to remove the deceased author from the manuscript. Question(s) for the COPE Forum Who… - Research
Exploring publication ethics in the arts, humanities, and social sciences: A COPE study 2019
In early 2019 COPE, with the support of Routledge (part of the Taylor & Francis Group), commissioned primary research with Shift Learning to better understand the publication ethics landscape for editors working on journals within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The research used a two-stage methodology: first exploring the issues qualitatively via two online focus groups with a… - Discussion documents
COPE Forum: 13 November 2017: Self-Citation: Where's the line?
A recent post on Scholarly Kitchen [1] raised some interesting points about the ethics surrounding citation, and specifically self-citation. Previously, COPE has discussed related issues surrounding self-citation by journals and editors [2] and citation of preprints [3]. During this forum, we broadened the discussion to include some of the questions related to self-citation by authors in schola… - Discussion documents
Citation manipulation
Citation manipulation refers to the following types of behaviour: • Excessive citation of an author’s research by the author (ie, self-citation by authors) as a means solely of increasing the number of citations of the author’s work; • Excessive citation of articles from the journal in which the author is publishing a research article as a means solely of increasing the number of… - Seminars and webinars
North American Seminar 2019: Women also know history
Karin Wulf, Professor of History and well-known “Chef” in the Scholarly Kitchen introduced us to the terms “manels” and “whanels” (all male panels and all white panels) and provided some suggestions to help identify a more diverse group of experts from which to draw authors, reviewers, editorial board memb… - CaseCase Closed
Dual submission and editor’s failure to take action
An article was submitted to our journal (journal A) in March. According to the journal’s working policy, the article was initially reviewed inhouse and comments were sent to the author. The authors replied to the comments but did not agree to the suggestion to convert the article to a short report. A rather impolite letter was sent by the author criticising the policies of the journal. We sent… - Case
Correcting the affiliation of an author after publication
A manuscript was published in our journal in 2015, and at the time of publishing (as now), the author was a faculty member of a university. The author's affiliation was not declared in the article, just the author's qualifications. Now the author wishes us to correct the paper and list her affiliation in the article. Question(s) for the COPE Forum Wh… - CaseOn-going
Duplicate submission and authorship dispute
A case report was submitted to our journal (journal X) in February and accepted for publication in September that same year. In late September, the first author on the manuscript contacted us to inform us that this exact case report had just been published in another journal (journal Y) by some of his colleagues, including some of the authors of our manuscript. In the initial submission to our… - Seminars and webinars
North American Seminar 2019: Ethical challenges in the arts, humanities, and social sciences
At the North American seminar 2019, Kath Burton (Associate Editorial Director of Arts & Humanities, Routledge, Taylor & Francis) presented the initial research findings and the solution put together on the back of some research conducted by COPE, supported by Routledge. The aim of the research was to better understand the publication ethics needs of arts, humanities and social sc… - Seminars and webinars
North American Seminar 2019: Just ideas? The Status and Future of Publication Ethics in Philosophy
At the 2019 COPE North American Seminar, Rebecca Kennison, from K|N Consultants, presented details of a project which "seeks to foster greater awareness among humanities scholars and editors about ethical issues in philosophy publishing…. [It] acknowledges that research and publication ethics in the humanities are in many ways, and for good reasons, complex matters and that, unlike in t… - Discussion documents
COPE Forum 11 February 2019: Diversity and inclusion in research publishing
It is widely recognised that teams and organisations in all sectors of society perform better and make better decisions when they embrace diversity and inclusion in their culture and, particularly, among their leadership. Diversity refers to having a wide range of human differences in the composition of a team. Inclusion, inclusivity, or inclusiveness refers to ensuring that all team members fe… - CaseCase Closed
Suspected plagiarism
A single author submitted a paper to our journal. A similarity check revealed 48% similarity with another published paper. The published paper was by different authors—5 in total. The similarities between the papers were in the introduction, methods and discussion sections. The submitting author did not reference the published article. We queried the corresponding author but have not rec…