Revised principles of transparency and best practice released
…Press release 15 September 2022 Revised Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing have been released by four key scholarly publishing organisations today. These guiding principles are intended as a foundation for best…- Case
Reviewer requesting addition of multiple citations of their own work
…authors to add citations to his work when reviewing their manuscript, often when there was no scientifically legitimate reason to do so. A deeper analysis of this reviewer’s activity showed that he predominantly asked for his own papers to be cited, as well as citations to papers that heavily cited his work. In some cases, he requested for more than 30 citations of his own papers to be added to… - Case
Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?
…via conferences is the norm; whole papers are submitted, and if accepted, become part of the publication record. In general, it is not a good idea to use hard cut-offs on plagiarism detection software, but rather to look at the areas of overlap for substantive or important duplications. Plenty of articles with 30%+ overlap are fine or easily fixed, and some severe examples of… - News
Case Discussion: Inconclusive institutional investigation into authorship dispute - university perspective comment
…for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2018 (the Guide). Section 8.1 of the Guide provides for ‘Collaborative research across multiple institutions’ and states: ‘Institutions should consider how preliminary assessments and investigations into potential breaches of the Code are to be conducted for multi-institutional collaborations on a case-by-case basis, taking into… - News
Authorship and Contributorship focus: an editor view and research institution view
…href="http://docs.casrai.org/CRediT" target="_blank">Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) system to articulate author contributions. Training and ongoing support on copyright and author’s rights that covers the complexity of authorship concerns at a research institution: eligibility for copyright protection; works-for-hire; copyright transfer and permissions; joint authorship; and copyright termination rights.… COPE team
…employee of COPE. Alysa Levene Operations Manager Alysa joined COPE in 2022 and is responsible for the operational side of the organisation. Previously she worked as an academic historian and has published on the history of…- News
Predatory behaviour in publication ethics
…academia, and the growth of Open Access publishing models which can make authors more open to believe offers of rapid publication and low article processing charges (APCs). Predatory publishing relies on a profit-making… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: May 2018
…Santiago in October, or perhaps at one of the many events our volunteer members of COPE Council are speaking at around the world. See you there, to continue the conversation! (Image credit: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: November 2020
…finally, our peer review workshop will be held on Thursday 19 November, at the earlier time of 9.00am GMT (5.00pm AWST, 2.30pm IST) to enable a wider global range of our members to add their insights and experiences to the event. This workshop is now full. Look out for more COPE workshops in 2021. Wishing you all… - Case
Who ensures the integrity of the editor?
An editor came across a letter from the editor-in-chief of his journal to a reviewer that asserted he had recommended the acceptance of a manuscript. He had in fact recommended the opposite, both verbally and in writing. The paper in question was a guideline on the therapeutic choices for a relatively common medical condition. The authors had claimed their conclusions and therapeutic recommenda… - Case
Confidentiality and consent in case reports
We would appreciate COPE Forum’s advice with regard to consent and confidentiality in the publication of case histories. Our journal is published three times a year and has a relatively small circulation but also goes to some postgraduate medical libraries, so is potentially available to a much wider audience. Our subscribers are doctors working with patients presenting with sexua… - Case
Withdrawal of acceptance based on potentially unconsented data
…even a research type letter, the authors could remove the affected material and references, without referring to the retracted papers. If the letters cite the papers in the context of journalology, or criticise the same issues that underlie later retraction, it could be argued the letters could stay, with an explanatory editorial note (see for example - Case
What extent of plagiarism demands a retraction versus correction?
…idea for the method on a blog 2 years earlier. Side by side comparison shows a significant overlap (approximately 25–30% of the article) between the blog and the article, in particular in the rationale for, and description of, the method. The text is rephrased in many places, but there are large sections that are structurally very similar between the article and the blog with some terminology and… - News
Artificial intelligence and authorship
…accelerating market of AI bots. The newest generation of these – the most discussed currently being OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the latest version of which was launched in November 2022 – are based on Large Language Models (LLMs). They are trained on vast banks of example text which enable them to determine, in a probabilistic sense, what… - Case
Inappropriate authorship on students paper
A cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study which was a final year student's project was submitted as an original article to our journal on 30 April 2011. On initial review it was obvious that it was conducted by students and written by them, but the list of authors had the supervisor as the first author, followed by 13 students. The supervisor, who was also the corresponding author,… - Forum discussion topics
Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”
…href="https://publicationethics.org/resources/research/paper-mills-research">Paper mills research report, COPE & STM, 2022 Systematic manipulation of the publication process, COPE guidance updated 2022 Potential “paper mills” and what to do about them – a publisher’s… - News
In the news: November 2020
…-one-largest-research-philanthropies-will-require-immediate-open-access" target="_blank">make their research immediately open access, as of January 2022. The new policies are similar to those of cOAlition S and are anticipated to put pressure on some very elite journals, such as Cell, Nature and Science. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has changed their open… - News
Post-publication conflicts of interest
…Trevor Lane on behalf of the COPE Education Subcommittee Related resources Editorial conflicts of interest COPE Forum discussion 2022 Terms and conditions
…href="#Top">Back to top Related pages Membership: universities and research institutes Page history Page last updated: 27 May 2022…- Event
COPE webinar: Standards in authorship
…Vice-President Academic and Provost at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is the co-founder and for over 30 years was the Editor of the Journal of Business Ethics. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Academic Ethics as well as Editor in Chief of Advances in Business Ethics Research (a book series). She is the Editor of Business Ethics in Canada…