- News
In the news: April 2021
…organisations embed a "dedication to equity and justice into everything a publisher does". COVID-19 The International COVID-19 suicide prevention research collaborative (ICSPRC) - Case
Author requests permission to publish review comments
…reviews and a commentary on the issues raised, prior to submission to a journal with open peer review. The author requested the journal’s consent for the review comments to be made public under CC licence. We declined permission to publish the reviews and explained that the journal operates a confidential single blind review process. Reviewers are informed that their names will not be revealed to… - Case
Suspicion that signed informed consent forms are forged
…for educative purposes. The editors should also consider whether there is enough evidence to suggest research misconduct, in which case the authors’ institution should be informed (in neutral terms, with the authors potentially copied). The editors may find COPE’s guidance on - News
Peer Review Week 2018: new and revised COPE resources
…12px Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; text-decoration: none;"> Create your own user feedback survey The COPE eLearning module on Reviewer Misconduct has been revised, peer reviewed and updated. Although eLearning is a member benefit, this module will be freely available to all for the month of September. We are also in… - News
In the news: November 2018 Digest
…findings. COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read November Digest: Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections… - Case
A case of scientific misconduct?
…authors wrote back to us, cc'ing the heads of their two research ethics committees, to say that indeed, the manuscript did not match the two different protocols they sent us. They explained that there was a fault in the manuscript and not in the work carried out. They explained that the paper they sent us did not describe a single study but rather parts of 4 different approved studies taking place over… - Case
A case with no independent institution to investigate
…an institutional investigation. However, in the absence of an independent institution that we could ask to investigate, we are seeking advice from the forum on how to proceed once we receive author B's explanation. Question(s) for the COPE Forum (1) In the absence of an independent institution, how do the Forum suggest we proceed once we receive… Revised principles of transparency and best practice released
…journals. DOAJ has more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of libraries and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of open access journals. This independent database contains over 18,100 journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities in English and 80 other languages. DOAJ is financially supported…- Case
Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?
…proceedings. The reviewer sent us the article downloaded from the conference website highlighting the overlapping paragraphs, which was nearly 80%. The journal wrote to the authors asking for an explanation. The authors stated that they had submitted an abstract of their work for participation in the international conference. The abstract was accepted on the condition that they submitted the… History of COPE
…COPE history timeline View COPE history, a visual timeline in full (PDF, 754 KB) 1997 to 2003 - first COPE meeting and a written…- News
Guest editorial: the challenge of AI chatbots for journal editors
…="http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jvv3q/eli5_what_exactly_is_text_burstiness_and_text/">where precise meaning is required eg in a legal sense) and burstiness (rare words appearing in a text) of the text. This might present an additional challenge for some authors using this software. Their writing may be detected and flagged up as… - News
In the news: December Digest
…src="/files/u7140/screen_shot_2019-12-03_at_13.16.26.png" style="float:right; height:164px; margin:3px; width:200px" />The Access to Transparent Statistics (ACTS) is a call to action for journals and funding agencies to enhance the quality of statistical reporting and an appeal to research institutions to spearhead the battle for reproducibility of results. Components of ACTS include standardisation of the contents of statistical paragraphs, making the… - News
Editor to Editor support for Journal Management
…Practices for Journal Websites (INANE collaborators 2016). Another related project is the recently published paper examining 80 nursing journals for adequacy of their author guidelines, conducted by Oermann and colleagues ( - Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around book publishing
…technology to access individual chapters, without accessing the whole book, so ethical statements on a chapter level is desirable. Who is responsible for ethics in book publishing? If journal articles are published with a CC-BY license, can the author publish a similar article in a book as a chapter? From a copyright legal perspective this is allowed, as long as… - News
Case Discussion: Withdrawal of paper at proof stage
…="https://publicationethics.org/case/dual-submission-and-editor%E2%80%99s-failure-take-action">19-06, Dual submission and editor’s failure to take action), the copyright for a paper published in a journal was held by another journal because the authors did not formally withdraw their earlier submission. This case illustrates what might happen if editorial office processes and communications are unclear or inconsistent. The second relevant COPE Core… - News
In the news: May Digest
…reviews has been commented on in a number of places including Physics Today and Science. A survey showed that nearly half of respondents had ghostwritten a peer review report, despite the 80% of them having the opinion that ghostwriting is unethical. - News
In the news: April Digest
…Integrity Principles with 9 best practices to achieve them. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-019-00094-3 Bias A Holmes and S Hardy continue their deep dive to describe the effect of gender, assessed in about 80% of the time for both reviewers and authors using Genderize.io on naming order in… - News
Letter from the COPE Vice-Chair: December 2022
…membership criteria, offering guidance and mentorship to support them in developing best practices in publication ethics. Making membership criteria transparent and mapping the application process to these criteria. It is worth noting here that we currently reject approximately 80% of all applications which do not meet our strict assessment criteria, many from countries outside of the… - News
In the news: January 2019 Digest
…this could be rectified and argues the case for changing the cultural norms to allow this.https://psyarxiv.com/exmb2 COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read - Event
COPE Seminar 2021
…Together shaping the future of publication ethics Taking place over a week, the online seminar included a variety of sessions, with speakers invited to share their experiences. The videos are available to…