- News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: November 2018
…China. Adrian Ziderman has been re-elected for a second term to COPE Council. We welcome them all as we move into the next year. Read November Digest: Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections COPE co-Chair - Case
Ethical approval requirements for case study reports
…should pay equal attention even if it is decided that informed consent for research does not apply to case reports or case series. COPE has guidelines regarding patient consent in case reports. It should be noted that these stipulate that journals… Rights and permissions policy
…href="#photo">Photography and copyright Reproducing or translating COPE materials Our COPE materials are available to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This means that you are free to copy…- News
Complaints and appeals
…upcoming COPE Forum and more. Read April 2018 Digest: Complaints and Appeals… - News
Post-publication discussions and corrections focus
…--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read November Digest: Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections. This issue of Digest announces new resources What to do if you Suspect Image Manipulation in a Published… - Case
Removing a retracted article from a third party site
…original article was published under a CC-BY license with the authors as the copyright holders. The article is available in full as a pdf on website Z. This is not one of journal A's indexing partners and we believe it may have been downloaded from journal A's website before retraction and uploaded to website Z. Numerous email takedown notices from the publisher to website Z have not been… - News
Case discussion: Editing peer review comments
…href="https://publicationethics.org/events/cope-forum-friday-6-march-2020">COPE Forum on 6 March. With this in mind, we highlight two cases from the COPE archive: Case 97-08 likely predated the online editorial management systems that allow confidential comments for the editor to be separated from their comments for the author. The submitter of the case… - Case
Ethical status of authors’ actions?
A consultant in public health and a consultant clinical biochemist employed by a health authority submitted a paper. It sought to address the question of benzodiazepine abuse and re-sale on the black market. The authors identified the practices with the highest prescribing rates for benzodiazepines, and asked GPs to agree to request urine samples from patients with a benzodiazepine prescription… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: January 2019
…height: 125px; margin-left: 3px; margin-right: 3px; float: left;" /> Read January 2019 COPE Digest newsletter and use the COPE Audit Tool, read a case discussion on citation manipulation, get dates in the diary for COPE events in 2019, and keep… - 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
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: July 2018
…3px; margin-right: 3px; float: left;" /> Disclosure: CG works for Wiley, where he is Director, Research Integrity and Publishing EthicsPicture credit: CC0 Creative Commons from - 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… - News
Case Discussion: Possible plagiarism
…sloppiness. The practice of citing with either quoting or paraphrasing is also the etiquette expected when copyright permission is not required, including use of material that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and material in the public domain (CC 0). The need for sound infrastructure and clear policies and processes in the editorial office is covered in the COPE - Case
A lost author and a new hypothesis
A paper was published in January 1998,and seven authors were credited. B was thanked for his contribution in the acknowledgements section. One year later B wrote to the editor, outlining two alleged incidents related to this paper. First, the cohort reported in the January 1998 paper was one that B had been working on since the early 1990s. In 1992–3 he sought collaboration with another researc… - News
Case Discussion: Editor and reviewers requiring authors to cite their own work
…discussion document which will be ready, on our website, early this year. Nancy Chescheir on behalf of the COPE Education Subcommittee Read January 2019 COPE Digest newsletter and use the COPE… - News
Research integrity and how to buy a Persian carpet: TOP Guidelines, part 2
…Picture by Garry Knight (Flickr: Persian Carpet) CC BY-SA 2.0 at http://bit.ly/2FKpQCo In “The art of buying a carpet,” Simon Busch suggests that a wise carpet buyer checks a carpet’s knot count (“You will find much truth under the carpet: turn it… - 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…