- Case
Conflicts of interest between authors and editors
…should declare this and not participate in the peer reviewer assignment or any editorial decisions, and a note should ideally be added in the paper about the independence of the peer review process. If the editor were already an editor in the previous articles and took part in their review process, their peer review has been compromised. A post-publication peer review would be needed with an… - News
Letter from COPE: June 2020
…="https://publicationethics.org/resources/discussion-documents/cope-forum-6-march-2020-editing-reviewer-comments">website. Stay healthy and stay safe. Nancy Chescheir & Caroline… - News
Case discussion: critiques after publication
…can be contacted and an expression of concern added in the interim. If the author remains uncooperative, the editor is bound to retract the paper for the sake of not misleading readers, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The retraction notice should transparently explain what post-publication review procedures were followed and what happened. As an additional… - News
In the news: October 2020
…="https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/books/diversifying-readership-through-open-access" target="_blank">usage of open vs non-open access books and found that OA books were dowloaded 10 times more often, and cited 2.4 times more often, than non-OA books. A systematic search of "vanished" open access journals, using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, discovered 176 open access journals that vanished from the web (2000-2019).… Lessons from COPE's Facilitation and Integrity
…of further remediation steps within COPE’s sanctions process. In 2020, COPE received 100 F&I submissions, 57 of which underwent full review by the subcommittee. The subcommittee completed the review of 49 cases, the highest number of concerns reviewed and closed since the process was implemented. A flowchart…- News
Predatory behaviour in publication ethics
…href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133320301270?via%3Dihub">list of predatory journals is inevitably subjective and varies from one list to another. Publishers and editors… Text Recycling: Forum discussion topic March 2013
…should amend the literature by adding the missing citation and clarifying what is new in the subsequent publication versus the original publication. Journal editors should consider publishing a retraction article when: There is significant overlap in the text, generally excluding methods, with sections that are identical or near identical to a previous publication by the same…- News
In the news: August
…="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/07/21/book-review-research-ethics-in-the-real-world-by-helen-kara/" target="_blank">https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/07/21/book-review-research-ethics-in-the-real-world-by-helen-kara/ Misconduct Jennifer A Byrne is a cancer researcher who is committed to cleaning the literature as much as she is to adding to it. She began her crusade to do so after noting… - News
In the news: January Digest
…behavioural research. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0772-6 Ethical oversight ICMJE recommendations have been revised. The main changes are rephrasing COIs to relationships and activities, adding efforts for inclusion and diversity, and advising against citing predatory… - News
In the news: December 2021
…highest PPMP or Gini index values, they found that the most prolific authors were members of the editorial board in 61% of the cases, and these papers were likely to be accepted for publication within 3 weeks of their submission. Peer review Is the peer review system in need of repair? The authors of - News
Case discussion: Consequence for dual submission
…sub-terms. Clicking on each sub-term takes you to cases classified under that term. The sub-terms shown at the most granular level reflect the two issues at the centre of this case: namely, “Multiple submissions” and “Misconduct/questionable behaviour (author)”. When clicked, these sub-terms respectively lead to lists of 57 and 79 directly relevant cases. Cases in those lists can be further filtered by… - News
In the news: October Digest
…intolerance. The authors surmise in the abstract that the editors at times have trouble aligning their beliefs and practices. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/leap.1259 Peer review Elsevier's Jeroen Baas and Catriona Fennell, both analytics experts, found that about 1% of 55,000… - News
In the news: December 2020
…the phenomenon of "vanished journals "- open access journals that disappear - Mikaek Laakso and co-authors consulted several major bibliographic indices and found 176 open access journals that vanished from the web between 2000-2019 from all major research disciplines and world regions. This highlights concerns about the integrity of the scholarly… - News
In the news: May 2021
…of misconduct The editors of a journal published a case history describing why they decided not to retract a paper, despite evidence of misconduct by one of the authors. Their conclusion was that to retract a paper where the outcome is still valid would be unethical and that, in such… - Forum discussion topics
Predatory publishing: next steps and where do we go from here?
…comments Anyone (members and non-members) can comment. Comments are reviewed and, on approval, added below. … - Case
Journal refuses to correct the record
…explained that the retraction notice had to link to the article. The retraction letter was not that easy to find—you would need to know what to search for to find it. No further action was ever taken by the publisher. On the plus side, their article has never been cited by any journals that are in Scopus, and our article has been cited 57 times by Scopus journals. We do not feel that we can do any… - News
Case discussion: gift authorship
…href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08989621.2020.1772060"> Accountability in Research published by Michael Reisig et al in 2020 identified gift authorship to be the most prevalent form of research misconduct, according to replies from tenured or tenure-track faculty at the top 100 research-intensive universities in the USA. This result, and past COPE Forum cases, suggests pervasive disregard, lack, misconception, or misinterpretation of… - Forum discussion topics
What does peer review mean in the arts, humanities and social sciences?
…include adding non-native speakers to editorial boards to advise from a high level perspective in an important way; editors entering retirement offering mentorship outside the publication process; for society journals, pairing society members internationally with published mentors and see if they can meet the authorship criteria Post your comments and feedback below. - News
In the news: June 2021
…-can-universities-and-journals-work-together-better-on-misconduct-allegations/" target="_blank">responded to questions from Retraction Watch about the recommendations. A group of researchers assessed the timeliness and quality of retraction notices for a group of papers, and found that responses to concerns were delayed and incomplete, and that the content of retraction notices did not adhere… - News
In the news: April 2018 Digest
…servers varied little from their final poublished versions, suggesting the commercial publishers’ added value is limitedhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1 Peer review fails to prevent publication of paper with unsupported claims about peer review A recent publication,…