COPE webinar: Allegations of misconduct
…Vice President for Research Compliance, Ohio State University, Ohio Tara Hoke, General Counsel, American Society of Civil Engineers, and COPE Trustee The webinar is free but is only open to COPE members. Register here. Speakers- News
Letter from COPE Vice-Chair: February 2020
This is my first opportunity to open the Digest, so welcome everyone. In this issue, we are releasing the final version of the COPE Strategy for 2020-2023. This document is the end product of months of hard work by your volunteers (COPE Council and Trustee Board) to develop a focus for the next three years.… Editing, reviewing and writing during COVID-19
…-role-of-academic-publishing/" target="_blank">published guidelines for authors, peer-reviewers, university press offices and journal authors to consider when publishing about suicide during the pandemic in order to prevent suicide deaths and avoid stimulating an increased rate of suicides in vulnerable populations. March 2021 In an analysis of two medical journals which use an open peer review process,- Case
Victim of article theft wants correction to list their name, not retraction
…to publisher B. We contacted publisher B who confirmed the details of the submission to them by author A in 2017. Author B is listed publicly as a reviewer for publisher B's journal, but publisher B could not confirm that they had direct access to this particular submission. Author B said their PhD advisor, now apparently deceased, had given them the article but they recently had doubts that… - Case
Allegation of authorship misconduct
…alleged plagiarism of ideas or method. The approach the journal should take therefore devolves on two issues: first the evidence for ‘theft’; and second, the nature of any prior contact between the two author/author groups which could explain how the ideas could have been accessed. On the first point, it does not appear as though any definite proof has been found to support theft of notes… - News
Collaboration
…from COPE’s institutional partners. In order to collaborate, associates and partners need to communicate openly and put aside personal desires, which is thoughtfully communicated in the “Opinion on Opinions” commentary by the COPE vice-chair. Numerous other collaborative activities are detailed… - Seminars and webinars
WCRI 2019: Preprints and their place in the publication ethics landscape
…on the ethics front, particularly in the health and medical fields where it is unclear whether open discussions on early research are beneficial toward improving the work, or whether there is potential harm in publishing unvetted and non-peer-reviewed findings. In this Monday afternoon session at WCRI, Chris Graf ( - Event
COPE webinar: Standards in authorship
…are just some of the questions we intend to cover during the webinar. There will be an open discussion with questions from attendees. You can email your question in advance or ask questions during the webinar. The webinar is free, and open to COPE members only. Register for authorship… Presentations
…href="/files/u2/Alpbach_08.pdf">Download PDF (456 kb) Presented by Harvey Marcovitch At the European Forum Alpbach sponsored by the Federation of Austrian Industry, the Austrian Research Centers and the Austrian Public Broadcasting Corporation Alpbach, Austria August 2008 A Common Standard for Journals' Conflict of Interest…What peer review means in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Forum discussion topic June 2020
…-review-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences-if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it/" target="_blank">Mudditt and Wulf (2016) and Denbo (2020) in articles in the Scholarly Kitchen, HSS disciplines are very dissimilar from STEM disciplines. As Mudditt and Wulf state, with respect to articles in HSS fields “many if not most, HSS fields are ‘book fields’, disciplines in which…- 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… - News
Update on COPE guidance regarding author name changes
…readers and ensure the changes downstream to indexing and discovery services. These notices are not appropriate in all circumstances however, particularly in the case of transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse (hereafter shortened to “trans”) authors because of the potential trauma caused by the continued circulation of their previous names and the risks to which disclosure of their gender… - Case
Duplicate publication in a non-English language journal
…which they inferred that the magazine was not a scientific publication. However, the publication is quite a well known journal in their country of origin. It does have an editor. It is indexed on PUBMED, as indeed was their original publication. The statement about “not writing a scientific publication” appeared to refer to the section, rather than to the journal as a whole: moreover, it was in… - Case
Concerns about the reliability of findings following re-analysis of a dataset from a published article
The Forum suggested that a better course of action would have been if the editor had asked the authors for their comments on the re-analysis, and then submitted the results of the re-analysis and the authors comments to an independent expect to review. Although the reader is happy to have the re-analysis attached to a commentary, this will not be formally indexed or linked to the… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum: 13 November 2017: Self-Citation: where's the line?
…that the present work is novel, and unrelated to past works. But on the other hand, too many citations to previous works by the same authors are also inappropriate, considered to be a potential attempt to manipulate an author’s own h-index. So where’s the line? What is a peer reviewer’s responsibility in terms of calling out self-citation? While… - Case
Does co-publication of an editorial constitute duplicate publication?
…simultaneously or jointly publish an article if they believe that doing so would be in the best interest of public health. However, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) indexes all such simultaneously published joint publications separately, so editors should include a statement making the simultaneous publication clear to readers.'... 'Secondary publication of material published in other journals or… - Case
Withdrawal of an article
…a PDF of a letter from the authors requesting that their paper be withdrawn. The letter is signed by the authors and is not dated. The reason the authors give in the letter for wanting to withdraw are vague, stating simply that they feel they have more they need to add to their work. As Journal B has not published a formal retraction notice (and no retraction notice appears in any indexing… - Case
Correction, retraction, or expression of concern?
Recently, we received a review report from PubMedCentral for the indexing application of one of our journals. Reviewers pointed out several shortcomings of particular articles below: 1. Discussions that did not thoroughly address limitations, and conclusions that were over-stated and/or not supported by the results. 2. Methods that were not described clearly and in sufficient… - Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Exploring Publication Ethics Issues in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
…globally and the quality of papers due to issues around language skills and access to literature. 2) Issues with detecting plagiarism and poor attribution standards was encountered by 58% of respondents. This was particularly prevalent among Business, Finance and Economics editors (79% of editors working in these fields). 3) 55% of respondents highlighted…