- News
In the news: May 2020
…that predatory journals are adapting, to "look" more like legitimate journals. The use of peer review appears to be increasing. These authors sent a previously published journal article to over 600 journals, a mix of predatory, legitimate open access and subscription-based journals. The paper was rejected by about 95% of the journals, but only about half of these were for ethical concerns. They… - News
Case Discussion: Lack of trial registration leads to new concerns about study conduct and ethical review/approval
…institution, who was not a co-author and wished to remain anonymous, informed the editors that the ethics committee named in the article did not exist at the institution. After not hearing back from the authors, the editors added a Comment to the article alerting readers of non-adherence to clinical trial requirements. The authors later said that ethics approval had been granted by another… - News
Where next in peer review? Part 2: COPE commentary
…knowledge to fully understand the capabilities and threats presented by AI. On the potential for personal information to make its way back into training data, for example, Dustin Smith (a self-declared ‘AI optimist’) was quite clear. Where LLMs are trained on closed data sets (that is, with no new information added to it over time), there is little risk of material submitted to it reappearing in… Membership application FAQ
…membership is accepted? When your application is accepted, you will receive an email confirming this. You will receive a link to COPE’s Member Handbook which details the benefits of being a COPE member as well as how to manage your membership. If membership fees are applicable, an invoice will be sent to you. Once your membership fees are paid, your journal details will be added to our…- News
In the news: December Digest
…international group of authors in Ophthalmology topics selected 200 references from PubMed and then checked them for Open Access status. Those that were paywalled were examined to see if they were available at established institutions in low income countries or through HINARI. There was a lot of heterogeneity from 0% full texts to 95%, with a mean of 47% availability. Use of complementary "alternative ways"… - News
Case discussion: gift authorship
…authorship came from further study of 81 of the hyperprolific authors. Of the 27 authors who completed a survey, 19 admitted failing to meet one of the four ICMJE authorship criteria in more than a quarter of their papers and 11 admitted failing to meet two or more… - News
In the news: February Digest
…were male and younger”. Only 8.1% of reviewers opted to reveal their names and the authors suggest that this supports the view that peer review depends on anonymity. Preprints Papers with involve human subjects or their medical records will not be accepted by 4 major orthopedic journals if they have been posted on a preprint server. The editors of the journals jointly published an… Common editorial dilemmas: hypothetical cases
…conclusions, adding that your last letter to them stated you would accept the revision if they took into account the reviewer's comments, which they have done in full. Discussion The editor has already said s/he would accept with minor revisions, which had been done. Arguably the onus is on the editor to accept this article.…- Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2022: Managing paper mills
…processes? They are probably equally concerning. They are both bad in terms of contaminating the published record, but they operate in a slightly different way. And paper mills and predatory publishers can overlap eg predatory publishers may run paper mills. We need more research to understand this. Are there any legitimate reasons for adding an author after acceptance? We have seen… - News
Welcome new COPE members April-June 2019
Welcome to our new members who have joined COPE between April and June 2019. The new members have been assessed against criteria outlined in the Principles of Transparency and signing up to COPE shows that they intend to follow the highest standards of publication ethics and to apply COPE principles of publication ethics outlined in the