- CaseCase Closed
Paper published without permission or acknowledgement from institution
An author affiliated with a research institution R published two papers as a single author, one of them in a journal of publisher A. After publication, publisher A was contacted by the research integrity officer of institution R with a letter of concern. The letter stated that the research institution has conducted a formal investigation and concluded that the author failed to acknowled… - CaseCase Closed
Unable to contact authors
A manuscript was submitted to a journal and after the review and revision process, the submitted manuscript was accepted for publication. During the manuscript revision process, the corresponding author was in contact with the journal: answered all of the emails, performed revisions of the manuscript, prepared answers to the comments of the reviewers, etc. When the manuscript was accepte… - CaseCase Closed
Authors requesting withdrawal of articles from similarity check database in order to re-publish
An author's institution requires that authors publish a set amount of times per year in journals that are indexed by Scopus in order to retain their tenure. The author submits to an open access journal and their paper is published after processing charges are paid. After publication the journal is dropped from the Scopus index. The author asks for the paper to be withdrawn by the journal so tha… - Forum discussion topics
Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”
September 2020 Increasingly, across the research publishing landscape, publishers are seeing large scale manipulation of the publication process. The production of fraudulent papers at scale via alleged ‘paper mills’ is one such manipulation. Participants discussed this at the COPE Forum, September 2020. Paper mills Pape… - CaseCase Closed
Author displays bullying behaviour towards handling editor
A handling editor rejected a paper without review, after consulting with a senior editor. The corresponding author sent an appeal about 2 weeks later where he requested that the paper be given a second chance and be sent for peer review. He added that, in case of a new decision to reject without review, the editor should provide a detailed response to a number of questions and comments raised i… - CaseCase Closed
Author admits failure to credit other authors
An author submitted a manuscript and stated that he was the sole author. The manuscript received a favourable peer review and eventually was accepted. Some time after the article was published, a co-author told the author to contact the journal to correct the author list. The author of record (AOR) did this and supplied co-author names to the journal. The editor worked with the author… - Seminars and webinars
WCRI 2019: Responsible authorship
COPE was invited to speak on responsible authorship in this panel discussion. Charon Pierson gave a view from COPE with an analysis of 134 authorship cases that have been submitted to COPE, by members, for discussion and advice. The qualitative analysis of cases related to authorship and contributorship reflects several broad categories of intentional and unintentional behaviours by auth… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship dispute during the review process
During the review process for a manuscript submitted to our journal, one of the reviewers alerted us that the manuscript appeared to be the work of a collaborator (Dr X) who was not listed as an author on the paper. It became clear that the manuscript’s corresponding author (Dr Y, affiliation A) was a postdoctoral researcher supervised by Dr X (previously at affiliation A, recently moved to aff… - CaseCase Closed
Removal of an author
A paper was submitted to a journal with authors A, B, C, D and E. The paper was peer reviewed. Before acceptance, the corresponding author asked for a new author, author F, to be added, and an existing author, author C, to be removed. The editorial office asked all of the authors (authors A, B, C, D, E and F) to complete a change of authorship request form and for the corresponding autho… - Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Exploring Publication Ethics Issues in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
We set out to ask: •Are AHSS editors aware of COPE and how can we best communicate our services to them? •What issues are they dealing with that are problematic and what do they need in terms of support? •What is COPE not currently providing? Respondents were asked to report issues that were most widespread and frequent: 1) Addressing langu… - Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: COPE retraction guidelines
Session on retractions at the European Seminar 2019, with speaker Howard Browman who shares a review of the updated Retraction Guidelines from COPE. During the session we also heard from Thed Van Leeuwen and Catriona Fennell. Links to their presentations are below: Watch now - 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 publisher… - 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… - 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… - 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… - 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… - CaseCase Closed
Victim of article theft wants correction to list their name, not retraction
Author A contacted us claiming that an article published in the journal recently by author B was stolen from an article author A had earlier submitted to two different publishers, publisher A in 2016 and publisher B in 2017. Author A provided the PDFs of the manuscripts they had submitted to those other publishers. The version submitted to us 2018 by author B was very similar to that submitted…