Seminar 2021: Ethical authorship versus fraudulent authorship

#C0PE2021

Thursday 30 September 2021, 15:00-16:00 (British Summer Time) (UTC +1) Find out what time this is in your country

REGISTER 

Research cultures that actively exert pressure to publish and emphasise quantity over quality encourage unethical practices that aim to inflate CVs and dishonestly gain author credit. Tactics may include misrepresenting a publication's content or author byline or both. At content level, the fraudulent practices of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, as well as "questionable" research/publication practices of duplicate publishing and salami slicing, also taint and bias the scholarly record.

In terms of author attribution, unethical authorship practices include guest, gift, and ghost authorship, not obtaining consent from co-authors, and adding fake names (perhaps with respected affiliations) as co-authors. It could be argued that these practices also count as fraud because they involve falsification or fabrication of author bylines or declarations, together with plagiarism of content.

Newer strategies to pad out publication lists include using paper mills to buy or sell authorship, constituting both fraudulent authorship and fraudulent content production. Meanwhile, knowingly publishing in predatory journals can be a way of exploiting fraudulent peer review to rapidly publish fraudulent content, with or without fraudulent authorship. What can be done to nurture, encourage, and reward ethical authors?

In this session, two guest speakers (one from an institution and one from a journal) will cover ways of promoting ethical authorship and preventing fraudulent authorship. The CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system, authorship definitions and policies, and relevant operating procedures and education will be reviewed from institutional and publishing perspectives. 

Moderator

Trevor Lane is a publishing and education consultant based in Hong Kong. He was the managing editor of several general and specialist medical journals in Asia and the senior editor of two social science journals in the United States. From 2005 to 2015, he headed a knowledge exchange unit at the Faculty of Dentistry, The University of Hong Kong, where he taught research communication and publishing ethics to postgraduate students and helped staff publish and publicise their research. Trevor is a COPE Council member and chair of the COPE Education subcommittee.

Speakers

Samantha Oakley, Researcher Development and Integrity Specialist (Research & Innovation Services), University of Glasgow

Evan Kharasch, Editor-in-Chief, Anesthesiology, and Merel H Harmel Distinguished Professor of Anesthesiology, Duke University

More information will be added here shortly.

Register

The session is free and open to COPE members only.

Seminar sessions will be recorded using Zoom and posted publicly on COPE's YouTube channel and website after the event.

Please read the COPE code of conduct for meetings and events before attending any of the sessions.

REGISTER 

COPE Seminar 2021 programme

The panel discussion is one of a series of nine sessions for COPE Seminar 2021, taking place over a week.