- Case
Conflicting authorship in a collaboration
An article by Author X was published in Journal A. The refereeing process was conducted along standard rules. Two months after publication, Journal A received a complaint from an independent researcher Y, demanding retraction of the article on the basis that the article was published with an author list representing only a minority of the actual collaboration, with no new experimental data or f… - News
In the news: April 2020
…direction varies. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/02/26/guest-post-an-open-agenda-european-funder-approaches-to-open-science/ UK universities and Wiley have struck a 4 year deal which will give UK-based corresponding authors the option to… - News
Case discussion: gift authorship
…href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-44015-002.html">The Behavior Analyst Today, Daniel Shabani et al (2004) reported that the 53 most prolific authors in the field of behaviour sciences published an average of 2.9 articles per year between 1992 and 2001; the 11 most prolific authors published 4.2 articles per year. In an analysis of medical papers published from 2008 to 2012, - News
In the news: January 2019 Digest
…this could be rectified and argues the case for changing the cultural norms to allow this.https://psyarxiv.com/exmb2 COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read - News
Facilitation & Integrity 2023, a year in review
…Errors in analyses, reporting or inaccuracies in published articles (13 cases) Plagiarism (11 cases) Editorial competing interests (7 cases) Authorship disputes (7 cases) Concerns about the handling of responses to published articles (for example, rebuttals, letters to the editor, comments) (6 cases) Citation rings or… - Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2021: Diversity, equity and inclusion
…allowed multiple options to be chosen, and received a total of 306 votes across all options. The most popular request is for Guidelines to be created (34% of votes), along with Flowcharts (26%) to aid decision making and increase confidence in processes to follow should any incidences of questionable material appear. Guidelines - 103 Flowchart - 80 Discussion Document… Potential paper mills
…href="https://publicationethics.org/resources/research/paper-mills-research">Paper mills research report, COPE & STM, 2022 Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills” COPE Forum discussion Systematic manipulation of the publication process,…- Case
Can a journal retract a paper against the recommendation of an institutional investigation?
A research article, published several years ago, was alleged to have integrity issues relating to some of the figures. Following detailed checking of the figures, the editors confirmed these issues and found more issues. The authors provided the raw data, some of which also had integrity issues. An institutional investigation concluded that the data were sound but the editor still feels uneasy… - Case
An ambiguous plagiarism case
A paper was published in journal A. The plagiarism check tool did not show any similarity during the peer review process. Some time after publication of the paper, the editor-in-chief was contacted by an author who had published a paper in journal B. They claimed that the paper published in journal A was plagiarised from their MSc research project thesis and asked journal A to ret… - Case
Undeclared author conflict of interest
A journal published a study related to a pilot programme run by an online mental health support resource which, at the time of publication, had a for-profit spinoff. At the time of the publication, this resource would share “anonymised” user data with the spinoff to create and market customer service software. Although this practice of sharing data has since been stopped, the authors of the man… - Case
Request to remove author from submitted manuscript due to academic misconduct
Regarding a submitted (but not yet accepted) paper from a scientific collaboration, one of the authors has asked whether an instance of academic misconduct or - for that matter - any non-scientific but rather unsavoury personal facts or accusations (e.g. a penal or civil proceedings) can be considered as a valid ground for requesting that the journal remove an author from the paper, as per the… - News
Where next in peer review? Part 2: COPE commentary
…held its first Forum on AI in November 2019, when the topic was AI in decision making. At that stage it was noted that technology was starting to bring in ‘data-driven solutions’, and that AI could potentially provide guidance to humans or automate a range of… - Case
Reviewer requesting addition of multiple citations of their own work
…authors to add citations to his work when reviewing their manuscript, often when there was no scientifically legitimate reason to do so. A deeper analysis of this reviewer’s activity showed that he predominantly asked for his own papers to be cited, as well as citations to papers that heavily cited his work. In some cases, he requested for more than 30 citations of his own papers to be added to… - Case
Plagiarism case
A letter was sent to the editor indicating that three articles (one of them in the editor’s journal) on identical subjects had been published in the same year (2006) by the same authors, accusing the first author of all three articles of stealing data from and plagiarising a previously published article from the academic institution where the first author previously worked. The letter, sent by… - Case
Duplicated gel images
A few months we were contacted by a dean of an institution who informed us about misconduct of one of the senior scientists in that institution. An investigation launched by the institution showed that author A and coauthors reused the same images to show controls in many figures in their different publications. This problem was found in three publications in our journal. We decided to… - Case
Case of figure duplication and manipulation involving two journals
The editors in chief of journal A and journal B, both owned by society C, received a letter from the last ‘senior’ author, also the corresponding author on one of the papers (author D), concerning separate papers published in both journals (paper E published in journal A and paper F published in journal B), informing them that one of the co-authors on both papers is under investigation for scie… - Case
Retraction or correction?
A reader contacted us with evidence that a number of western blots in a manuscript published by us in 2007 had been duplicated from other published papers; in one case, the same gel was duplicated in the paper itself. I compared the original papers and agreed with the reader. Some of the blots had also been duplicated in other papers but all had been published previous to being published in our… - 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… - Case
Article published at two journals after withdrawal from first journal
Journal B was contacted by a group of authors who had published their article in Journal B a few months previously. The authors were concerned as they found that their article had been published by Journal A, a journal they had previously submitted the article to but withdrawn prior to publication. Journal B requested the withdrawal confirmation from the authors, and this was duly provided. On… COPE team
…employee of COPE. Alysa Levene Operations Manager Alysa joined COPE in 2022 and is responsible for the operational side of the organisation. Previously she worked as an academic historian and has published on the history of…