- Event
COPE webinar: Standards in authorship
…-contributors.html Beyond authorship: attribution, contribution, collaboration and credit http://openscholar.mit.edu/sites/default/files/dept/files/lpub28-2_151-155.pdf Transparency in Authors' Contributions and Responsibilities to Promote Integrity in Scientific Publication Outcomes of editors' attempts to investigate research misconduct
…Plagiarism 7 2 2 2 14% Total (%) 79 16 (20) 15 (19) 23 (29) 36 (46) In about one in five cases, the individual was exonerated. But in about 20% of cases,…Seminars
…href="http://youtu.be/SPPdHJ_kByE">Watch presentation [11:59] Differences in publication ethics in Central and Eastern Europe — Professor Ana Marusic, University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia, and Editor in Chief of Journal of Global Health Download presentation [PDF 1285kB] |Watch presentation …- Case
No ethics committee approval of a study
Our journal received a manuscript describing a comparison of two different techniques for patients in the intensive care unit. There was no information on ethics committee approval and so we asked the authors if approval was obtained. They replied that they had not applied for ethics committee approval “as it was a clinical comparison of two existing methods, none of them experimental. All pati… - Case
A case of parallel publication?
Paper A appeared in a foreign language journal, together with an English abstract. Paper B was submitted to us, and one of our referees alerted us to the similar content. Closer inspection, including retrieval of the original foreign language manuscript and review by a deputy editor with a working knowledge of that language, and inspection of the tables by the editor and another editor,… - Case
Criteria to determine whether an author’s response to concerns about data validity is satisfactory
Questions were raised regarding the validity of data in two published papers (from the same author). The journal therefore followed the initial steps as listed in the COPE flowchart ‘What to do if you suspect fabricated data’ and contacted the author as appropriate. The author responded promptly and provided all the information requested (ethics approval letters, the original protocols… - Case
Using industry knowledge to evaluate an ethics case
A journal owned by publisher A recently posted an article critical of publisher B. Both publishers A and B are COPE members. Publisher B has already responded with several claims about the author’s methodology. Publisher A would normally defer to the journal’s editors. However, because the content of the article relates to the publishing industry, publisher A has particular insights into the to… - Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2022: Managing paper mills
…evaluation. An example of this was discussed on Retraction Watch this week. What is the most effective identifier of a paper mill [from the list cited in Renee Hoch’s talk]? I encourage editors evaluating articles for paper mill concerns to take… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: April 2019
…What we’ve learned: Reflections at the end of our term as COPE Co-Chairs Image credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0-migrated Jerry Segraves-jerrysfoto.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue-reflect.jpg We often reflect… - News
In the news: February 2021
…="http://www.chemistryworld.com/news/imposters-hijack-journals-peer-review-process-to-publish-substandard-papers/4013050.article#/" target="_blank">themed issue and commissioned the proposers to handle the papers and assign referees. The problem is that the proposal came from a sophisticated group of fraudsters and the 19 accepted papers would otherwise have been rejected by the Journal for being either out of scope or below publication standards. In their announcement of the scam, the Journal described the… - News
In the news: March 2021
…-the-pandemic-changed-editorial-peer-review-and-why-we-should-wonder-whether-thats-desirable/" target="_blank">differences in the quality of peer review for papers submitted prior to and during the pandemic were identified. The review of Covid-19 papers did not emerge as less thorough but there was a shift in the quality criteria used to assess the manuscripts. The author of the study concluded that the review of Covid-19 papers were milder and satisfied with lower standards, such as smaller sample size, fewer… - News
In the news: September 2021
…illustrated that Southern research outperforms research from the North. Research systems in the South should be able to define frameworks for assessing the value of research. COVID-19 The reported - Case
Possible authorship conflict over an article published ahead of print
Journal A received an original article (article B) with three coauthors which showed substantial similarities with a single-authored article accepted in the same journal a few months previously (article A). The author of article A was one of the three coauthors of article B. The journal contacted the corresponding author of article B (Author 2) to inform them of the similarities between… - News
In the news: December 2021
…research data collection. It includes recommendations that, during research design, consideration should be given to whether gender questions need to be included and, if they do, nonbinary genders should be explicitly included. In this - News
Tackling the problem of paper mills
…virtual) Academic Publishing Europe Conference. The session, “The Version of Record under Attack! The Dark Side of the Scholarly Publishing Universe”, was chaired by Dr Liz Marchant (Taylor & Francis). The session had presentations from two editors of scholarly journals, Professor Dr Christian Behl and Professor Dr Bernhard Sabel, and from Tim Kersjes, a Research… - Event
COPE webinar: managing paper mills
…top Related resources Paper mills: authorship for sale COPE Seminar 2021 Systematic manipulation of the publication process, COPE guidance, updated 2022 - Case
Publishing a letter concerning a paper published in another journal many years ago
Recently, Journal X received a letter to the editor based on an article published in another journal about 8 years previously. The editors of Journal X believe this letter is important to their readers. The original article was a seminal paper which changed practice. However, a group of authors challenged some of the data published in this trial in a subsequent review published about 7 ye… - Case
Data integrity issues
Several years ago, a third party contacted the journal with concerns about data irregularities in two randomised controlled trials published about 10 years ago. Both of the papers were published before the journal had strict requirements on data upload to a public repository and availability. The journal sent an initial email to the corresponding author of both papers (the same author fo… - Case
Author accused of sexual harassment
A reviewer for Journal X declined to review a paper as author Y has been the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. Author Y left the institute before the result of the investigation, thereby avoiding the outcome of the case. There is an academic loophole which allows those accused of misconduct to avoid any potential consequences by resigning before the outcome of the investigation, mea…