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News

In the news: April 2020

Diversity & Inclusion

In a study of gender bias in 145 journals in various areas of research, including 1.7 million authors and 740,00 referees, these authors show that in biomedicine and health journals women authors were treated generally favourably by editors and reviewers. This is in contrast to social science and humanity journals. The authors advocate for gender diversity among reviewers and editors to mitigate the perception and reality of bias.     

News

Welcome to new COPE Council members

Following our recent elections, we're delighted to welcome six new Council Members to COPE.

Each of our Council members brings their own experience, knowledge and skills to help us all work towards improving ethical practice in the publication of research in our community.

Eleanor Gendle

Executive Editor at The Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK

News

Editing of reviewer comments: survey

Following our Forum discussion on this topic in March 2020, we would like to hear your views on an editor's ability to alter the contents of a submitted peer review.

Views from editors and publishers will form the basis of a COPE discussion document on the topic. Please fill in the short survey. 

Deadline to complete survey: Friday 27 March 2020

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/H5PRXGY

News

Letter from the COPE Chair: March 2020

COPE, like many organisations, is grappling with the impact of the coronavirus and we are sorry to inform you that our Trustee Board made the difficult decision to postpone our North American seminar planned for June 2020. Clearly, the health of our members and staff is our first priority, and we hope to announce a new date in 2021 in the coming months.

News

Publication ethics issues in the social sciences

In 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 results from Social Sciences journals show which are the most serious, most widespread, most frequent issues, and those editors are least confident in dealing with.

News

In the news: March Digest

Open Science

The United States Office of Science & Technology Policy recently posted a notice of request for information titled “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting from Federally Funded Research.” Comments from stakeholders on approaches for broader access to federally funded research are due by March 16.

News

Case discussion: Editing peer review comments

Peer reviewers provide their own intellectual property to the important work of reporting research. Sometimes, though, their comments may not align with a journal’s style or requirements, or can stray into the realm of what some call “hostile reviews”. Also, sometimes reviewers miss the mark and either do not understand the paper or parts of it, or include content that is factually incorrect. What is an editor to do in their effort to balance the interests of the authors, reviewers, journals

News

Letter from COPE Vice-Chair: February 2020

This is my first opportunity to open the Digest, so welcome everyone. In this issue, we are releasing the final version of the COPE Strategy for 2020-2023. This document is the end product of months of hard work by your volunteers (COPE Council and Trustee Board) to develop a focus for the next three years. Our four strategic priorities over this period can be summarised as:

News

In the news: February Digest

Misconduct

Translation plagiarism is a type of disguised plagiarism which occurs when authorship credit is taken by someone who republishes the work of someone else, but in a different language. The difficulty of identifying this type of plagiarism is explored and the potential damage done by it, in the field of philosophy, examined.

https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12188

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