- News
European Association of Science Editors - Short Course February 2011 - How to be a successful journal editor
EASE (European Association of Science Editors) is hosting Pippa Smart's How To Be A Successful Journal Editor course on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 February 2011 in Warsaw, Poland. Pippa Smart will run her very popular course at the National Cancer Centre in Warsaw, kindly hosted by Edward Towpik. More information about course content can be found here: http://www.pspconsulting.org/journals.shtml… - Case
“I was acknowledged but I should be an author”
A person named in the acknowledgements of a paper wrote to the editor indicating that they had been in part responsible for the analysis and interpretation of the data and should therefore be named as an author. I have had extensive correspondence (copies of emails, etc.) from both parties and spoken to both on the telephone. Clearly, earlier there had been an exchange of data between… - Event
Tokyo University & Kyoto Pharmaceutical University
COPE council member Tracey Bretag will give two presentations on academic and research integrity in Japan, during which Tracey will speak about COPE guidance. These will be at Tokyo University on 'Academic integrity - why is it so important?' with an audience of postgraduate global and community health students. This will be followed… APAME 2013 Tokyo
…APAME 2013 Tokyo Asia Pacific Association of Medical Editors (APAME) Convention 2013, Tokyo, Japan Date: 2–4 August 2013 Venue: Japan Medical Association (JMA) Auditorium, 2-28-16, Honkomagome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8621, Japan COPE will hold two 90 minute sessions on the afternoon of 3 August during the annual congress of the…- Event
COPE Australian Forum
…?menu=1&id=25" rel="nofollow">http://www.uq.edu.au/maps/index.html?menu=1&id=25 The Forum is where we discuss cases submitted by members. Anyone with an interest in publication ethics, including non-members of COPE, are welcome to attend. To submit a case for discussion at this Forum, please email the COPE administrator with a summary of the case. Cases must be completely anonymised. The deadline for case… - Case
Patients with vitiligo treated with anti-fungal drugs by a general practitioner
A letter was submitted for publication in which a general practitioner described how he treated patients with vitiligo “simultaneously with an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial medicament over a prolonged period.”He has done this because:“As is now known,a fungus resembles the human being genetically and there is a possibility that a fungus can hide in the melanocyte (analogically as is being… - Case
Dispute over submitted comment and the right to be forgotten
Some time after publishing a paper, a journal received a comment highlighting serious issues with the methods reported, and claiming that the conclusions could not be trusted. The comment was 13 pages long and rather technical in nature, so it was peer reviewed. The journal contacted the authors to respond to the comment but they replied that they wished instead to completely… - Case
Query about errata
…original online pieces. Questions for COPE Council Can you advise COPE's position on whether notes about errata and corrigenda should be included in the original online version of the article to which they apply, particularly if the correction has subsequently been made in the html version and the pdf? Is it acceptable to publish notice of a particular erratum in… - Case
Institutions paying authors to be named on papers
Some academic institutions are paying authors for the name of the institution to be included in the manuscript so that the institution has an increased number of publications in a given year. The institution gives the author payment and the author terms it as ‘funding’ or ‘grant’, which is not the case. The author publishes the research article in a journal with two affiliations and explains… - Case
Reviewer requests to be added as an author after publication
…conflict of interest or request that they should be an author on the paper. The reviewer returned a very good review and along with another two reviews (R2/R3), and after revision (where the revision once again was sent to R1) the paper was accepted and published. A few months later, the journal was approached by another researcher (E1 who is from the same laboratory as R1) who said that… - Case
Can a published journal article be submitted to conferences?
An article is submitted to a journal and accepted for future publication. The authors receive the acceptance letter and the script is waiting for the final publication process (within 4-6 months). During this time the authors ask the journal if they can present the full text of the article at a conference (which is going to be held before the publication by the journal). They also… - Case
Author retracts request to be removed from author list
…data and conducted the analysis. The third and fourth authors (Drs C of University 1 and D of University 2) aided in analysis and write-up. After requesting they be removed as an author, Dr A followed up 5 days later with a second email indicating they wished to withdraw the request. The wider context is that Dr B has been the subject of much attention in the discipline and the media for… - News
COPE at Sense about Science workshop. Peer review: the nuts and bolts
…="https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/cope-ethical-guidelines-peer-reviewers">ethical issues. “Peer review is amazing” Sam Illingworth Sam Illingworth (Senior Lecturer in Science Communication, Manchester Metropolitan University) explained his own experiences of peer review, and although there are frustrations, peer review can be an amazing, positive experience helping researchers… - Case
Competing interest issue
…the journal website, the evaluator was not listed as an author on the article but featured as an author on the side-bar search tool. When the editor looked for the commentary in the HTML version, it could not be found. Only when the editor looked at the full text PDF version could the commentary then be read, where it was included on the last page of the article. Essentially, the article and… - Case
Failing to get consent from an ethics committee
This case was described to me by an author who is about to submit a paper. He has discovered that a member of his team has produced a lot of fraudulent data for other studies, and has forged consent from ethics committees. This researcher has been reported to the GMC and his case is pending. The problem with the paper about to be submitted to us is that the fraudulent researcher falsely… - Seminars and webinars
Asia-Pacific Seminar 2011: The range of conflicts of interest and how they should be managed
…Download presentation: The range of conflicts of interest and how they should be managed (PDF, 6750KB)… - Case
Plagiarism and copyright of material without permission
…electronic and hard copy published papers. It has a Creative Commons permission 3.0 publishing license. All authors submit written copyright forms for their articles before publishing. The CC license requires that an appropriate credit be given, which in this case has not been done. In this case, specifically: 1. All articles in this e-book that were 'stolen' from the journal have no… - News
December 2017 news
…Humans Run Experiments, a Robot Writes the Paper The future of automated scientific writing is upon us--and that's a good thing.Robot writes paper Fostering Integrity in Research A consensus study report of The… - Case
An investigation into results that were “almost too good to be true”
A general medical journal received an RCT from a seldom-published, single-author, in an eastern European country. The results were striking, with an effect size that surpassed that of established medications for this condition, so the manuscript was sent for peer review. One reviewer commented that the results were “so highly statistically significant it is almost too good to be… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: February 2022
Happy New Year! Or at least Happy Lunar New Year to all. I should also add a happy 25th anniversary to COPE. In 25 years of COPE, we have grown to reach broader and more diverse audiences who have an impact on integrity in research and its publication, and this year we will introduce universities and research institutes to the fold. Over the coming months, we will be reaching out…