- Case
Serial plagiarism by an experienced author
Suspicions were raised on 20 September 2012 by a reviewer who commented that some of the passages in a submission from Dr J were similar to an earlier paper published in our journal by the same author. An iThenticate check indicated a similarity index of 60%: however, the overlap was not from that earlier paper but from another source by a different author which had contributed 41% of the mater… - Case
Managing an editor’s undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article
An opinion piece on a polarising political and technological topic was published. A discussion ensued on social media, and shortly after, the publisher received a formal complaint stating that the editor-in-chief of the journal, who had managed the peer review process for the manuscript, had a conflict of interest and should not have made the final acceptance decision. When the publishing team… - Translated resources
Proceso de revisión por pares comprometido en artículos publicados: caso
Al percatarse de un alto volumen de envíos del autor A, el editor X mostró su preocupación sobre los revisores sugeridos por el autor y sus comentarios. El autor A había sugerido en la mayoría de los casos los mismos revisores para todos los envíos, los revisores sugeridos tenían direcciones de correo electrónico imposibles de verificar, los comentarios se devolvían muy rápido (en 24 horas)… - 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… COPE webinar: Understanding text recycling
…Understanding text recycling Friday 7 August 2020, 16:00-17:15pm (BST) Registration is now closed for this event COPE is hosting a webinar on text recycling when we will hear the latest findings from the members of the Text Recycling Research Project since- Case
Questionable authorship information
We have a paper in production that presents refutations of common criticisms made of a domestic cleaning or skin care ingredient. The majority of the authors are scientific research officers of a firm that sells products containing the ingredient. One other author is stated to be associated with a university but does not appear to hold a PhD. It is stated in the corrected proofs that this in… - 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, wa… - News
In the news: January 2018 Digest
…target="_blank">http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187394 But maybe this will all be a thing of the past when automated tools are writing our scientific papers, in the not too distant future? - News
When the peer review process goes sideways
…text-decoration:underline">Case 15-05 illustrates multiple ways that a reviewer failed to uphold this principle. The reviewer failed to disclose when invited by the editor to review the paper, their involvement in the design of the research project being reported. In fact, after the paper was published, the reviewer and another colleague asked to be named as authors. This particular case illustrates ethical breaches by… - News
Letter from COPE: June 2020
…questionnaire with both members and non-members. Interesting and informative opinions emerged from both the Forum and the online survey ‘Editing of reviewer comments’. From the survey, completed by 145 individuals, about 15% said they believed it is never acceptable for an editor to edit a peer… - Case
Reviewer requests to be added as an author after publication
A paper was submitted to our journal. The associate editor assigned to the paper immediately assigned a reviewer who he knew was well qualified to give a good review, as they had worked with the authors before. The editor did think it odd that the reviewer was not an author on this particular paper, given the close collaboration. However, when invited, the reviewer (R1), did not flag up any con… Common ethical and editorial dilemmas of author misconduct: how should we respond?
…0 2001 39 30 9 0 2002 18 14 4 0 2003 22 15 5 2 2004 25* 17 7 1 Total 212 163…- News
In the news: May 2021
…Peer Community In Registered Reports, has launched to provide peer review on behalf of publishers for Registered Reports. 15 journals including BMJ Open and Royal Society Open Science have signed up to use the service. A description of the new service is here. Allegations… - Case
Possible violation of the Helsinki Declaration on Scientific Research with Humans
A manuscript underwent peer review and the resulting reviewer comments raised grave concerns about the ethical legitimacy of the study.The reviewer: questioned the authors’ impartiality, suggesting that there was an undeclared conflict of interest; raised serious concerns about the extent to which participants gave informed consent; strongly doubted that the… - Case
Suspected image manipulation involving four journals
Editorial office staff at journal A noticed possible image manipulation in two figures of a new paper submitted by author X. These suspected manipulations involved images of gels which appeared to contain multiple duplicated bands. This prompted editorial staff to look at the submission history of author X to journal A in more detail. It was found that author X had previously submitted t… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2021: Introduction to publication ethics
…10px; float: left; width: 90px; height: 90px;" />Simon Linacre is Director of International Marketing & Development at Cabells having previously spent 15 years at Emerald Publishing, where he had direct experience in journal acquisitions, open access and business development. Simon is an ALPSP tutor, currently leading courses… - Case
Call for retraction of a commentary
A journal received two emails from different individuals, both critical of a commentary published in the journal. One cited serious errors, the other noted inaccurate statements, incorrect literature citations and fundamental flaws regarding misinterpretations or over-interpretations which could affect public health. The second email also cited the potential for the commentary to be used for (u… Presentations
…style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 24px; "> 2009 What ethical issues do journal editors bring to COPE?- News
Guest article: Research misconduct
…="https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/topics/research-and-innovation/concordat-research-integrity">include a range of additional behaviours. One grey area is around questionable research practices. These are a range of behaviours that result in the preferential reporting and publication of findings that are deemed interesting. This distorts the published record so that important negative data remain unpublished and hidden. The term questionable… - Case
Conflicts of interest between authors and editors
Recently, we have received a manuscript submitted by our Editor in Chief (EiC), with almost all of the Editorial Board Members and some of our authors of previous submissions as co-authors. In dealing with this we noticed that some of our previous published articles currently have conflicts of interest between the authors and the Academic Editor (AE). Our peer review policy states that t…