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Facilitation & Integrity 2023, a year in review

COPE’s Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee (F&I) is one of our most active services. When it was launched in 2010 its role was envisaged as dealing with complaints concerning member journals. In 2017 it was relaunched as F&I in order to emphasise and clarify that its purpose is to  facilitate a resolution and that it does not have a regulatory role. Since then its approach has been firmly one of facilitator between the COPE member and the person who has raised a concern about whether procedural matters have followed COPE’s guidance. Since 2017 its work has been accompanied by a sanctions policy as a mechanism to raise matters to the Trustee Board where a concern is identified about journal practices. 

In this review we describe the work that F&I has dealt with in 2023, and point out some of the new challenges it has encountered.

The F&I subcommittee is composed of COPE Council members (currently 8) and is supported by an F&I Officer who works for COPE on a freelance basis. When an author or a reader submits a concern, the F&I Officer carries out an initial review to ensure that it is in scope. If it is, the concern is passed to a member of the subcommittee who works with the F&I Officer to approach the journal and their publisher for comments on the process that was followed to handle the presenter’s concerns when first raised. The member of the subcommittee will then review whether the process the journal and/or publisher followed aligns with COPE recommendations. This review may satisfy the subcommittee that the journal’s process has aligned with COPE guidance; alternatively they may recommend that the journal makes changes to ensure COPE best practices are followed. In situations where the F&I subcommittee has concerns about practices at the journal or its engagement with COPE, it will refer the matter to the Trustee Board for review per the sanctions process. 

Cases handled in 2023, some highlights

As part of our annual reporting F&I cases are classified by the concern raised by the presenter. So far in 2023 there have been 10 types of concern which have attracted five or more cases. These are:

  • Handling of retractions and expressions of concern (20 cases).
  • Concerns about Integrity of published work, including potential manipulation of data or images (14 cases)
  • Errors in analyses, reporting or inaccuracies in published articles (13 cases)
  • Plagiarism (11 cases)
  • Editorial competing interests (7 cases)
  • Authorship disputes (7 cases)
  • Concerns about the handling of responses to published articles (for example, rebuttals, letters to the editor, comments) (6 cases)
  • Citation rings or citation manipulation (5 cases)
  • Redundant publication or salami slicing (5 cases)
  • Inappropriate peer review practices and/or reversal of acceptance decisions (5 cases)

These themes are consistent with previous years, and many share another characteristic with last year’s cases too, which is that many cases raised were also related to publications in special issues. This is a clear area of current concern, and COPE released a new discussion document on handling special and guest edited collections earlier this year; the guidance introduces recommendations for journals and publishers for handling collections that are edited by guest editors. 

The majority of cases involve journal articles, but in 2023 F&I also saw concerns raised involving books, conference proceedings and other article types. COPE is currently developing guidance in these areas which should provide further support to editors in handling cases such as these. The Strategy subcommittee is also discussing how far COPE’s remit reaches in terms of research output, and how far our existing guidance applies to concerns raised beyond more traditional publications.

While most cases are submitted by readers and authors, we also occasionally receive submissions to F&I by journal editors and institutions. Four cases in 2023 were submitted from universities and research institutions. These were mostly in relation to concerns where a journal editor had not replied to a request to correct the record; a concern voiced in several of the talks delivered to COPE’s Publication Integrity Week in October. Editors tell us that they have similar issues, and COPE will be working to facilitate greater dialogue between publishers, editors, and universities in 2024.

Cooperation between research institutions and journals

While most cases are submitted by readers and authors, we also occasionally receive submissions to F&I by journal editors and universities and research institutions. Most of these concerns relate to communication between universities and journal editors/publishers, particularly in relation to correcting the scholarly record; a concern voiced in several of the talks delivered to COPE’s Publication Integrity Week in October. COPE will be working to facilitate greater dialogue between publishers, editors, and universities in 2024. More information can be found in our Guidelines on cooperation, between research institutions and journals on research integrity cases a revised version of which will be published early in 2024. We will also be releasing a new flowchart on Guidance for when institutions are contacted by journals.

Data policies and citation rings

Two topics in particular featured more prominently in this year’s F&I cases compared to earlier years. The first deals with concerns about the availability of data underlying publications, and whether/how journals enacted their data policies. The second relates to concerns about citation rings. They reveal that readers are becoming more accustomed to being able to access research data and are expecting journals to have sound and enforceable policies on data sharing. But also that readers are live to manipulation of the publication process at scale, as in the case of paper mills 

Let us take an example of a case which raised concerns about data availability for a study reported in a journal. The presenter submitted the case because they felt that the journal in question was not upholding their own data availability policy following a request for access. Further enquiry about the journal’s processes and policies revealed several more ambiguities and issues with the data which were also followed up and which eventually led to the authors submitting an updated version of the paper. Members dealing with similar issues may find the Joint Force 11/COPE Research data publishing ethics working group recommendations useful in this area. At the time of writing, the journal is still in the process of evaluating the resubmission and considering how to present the correction of the record and the underlying data. In this particular case the original concern revealed several deeper issues to do with the handling of requests for data underlying published papers, but the facilitation process appears to be moving in a constructive direction. One of the key benefits of F&I is that it is able to enter into dialogue with publishers and editors which most readers cannot. 

As trends change in scholarly publishing, so too do the concerns that arise, and COPE is committed to ensuring that the work of the Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee remains relevant and useful. A number of changes are being discussed currently to increase the transparency of the subcommittee’s work (covered in Digest in January 2023) and we will report further on this in coming months. 

Further reading