Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via paper mills: Forum discussion topic September 2020
…the publication process are being seen. The production of fraudulent papers at scale via alleged ‘paper mills’ is one such manipulation. Paper mills are profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organisations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research. They may…- News
Letter from the COPE Chair: October 2020
…href="https://publicationethics.org/publishers-perspective-paper-mills">publisher perspective that describes collective actions required to help address these issues. Finally, my congratulations to Michal Tal-Socher and Adrian Ziderman, authors of a paper funded by a COPE research grant. Their paper, Data sharing policies in scholarly publications: interdisciplinary comparisons, has been… - Webform
COPE peer review workshop, November 2020
…Peer review workshop Thursday 19 November 2020, online workshop 9.00am - 10.30am (GMT) (COPE Members only) REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED AS WORKSHOP IS FULL Following on from the success of our Peer Review Workshop during this year’s Peer Review Week, COPE is re-running… - Case
Potential redundant publication
A group of authors from the same specialty unit published a study in Journal A on all prehospital X procedures. They then sent another paper on X procedure in a subgroup of patients to Journal B. Paper B references paper A, but does not make it apparent that there is any overlap in these studies. On questioning by editor B, they stated that no patients in paper B were included in the previous s… - Case
Ethical approval and parental consent
A journal received a paper from a single author, attributed to a UK institution, in which 10 children were operated on using two techniques, each child having one technique to one side and one to the other side, at the same operation. The paper went to review, and neither reviewer spotted that this was a prospective surgical study on children, with no mention of consent or ethical… - Case
Prolific authors
…Wells F: Fraud and misconduct in biomedical research. BMJ Books, 1993), for example, Robert Slutsky published 1 paper every 10 days. Questions for COPE: (1) Is our suspicion of these authors reasonable, and at what levels do other editors become concerned about whether or not an author is truly deserving of authorship? - Case
Lack of patient consent for a case report, patient confidentiality
A case report was submitted to journal X reporting on a child who had been admitted to hospital suffering an injury, which the doctors suspected resulted from a deliberate cigarette burn. This was not proved until the child returned to hospital with other non-accidental injuries, and following a full criminal investigation the child’s parents were convicted of child abuse. Patient consen… - Case
Authorship dispute
Professor X claims that he should have been a coauthor on one of two peer reviewed publications and the senior author on the other. The situation is unusual in that Professor X is now retired and his name was omitted from coauthorship of both papers. Professor X argues that he should have been the senior author of the first manuscript since the funds to initiate the project were directly derive… - Case
More than a breach of confidentiality?
A journal received two manuscripts on the same topic in short succession.Manuscript A was rejected after peer review; manuscript B, submitted a few months later, was accepted after peer review. When manuscript B was published, author X contacted the journal to express concern about similarities between both papers and the fact that the first had been rejected and the second accepted. The… - Case
Fraudulent data presented in a manuscript
…about the result (ie, 100% procedure success rate). One of the peer reviewers, reviewer X, who works with author A at the same institute in Europe, and who was also acknowledged in the author’s submission, provided further comment. In his letter to editor, he stated that “I have reviewed some of their manuscripts more than 10 times, and I have refused to be associated with their research, because… COPE Forum
…peer review, editing of reviewer comments Predatory publishing Ethical considerations around book publishing- News
In the news: June 2018 Digest
…Review The theme of Peer Review week, September 10-15, 2018, is “Diversity and Inclusion in Peer review. The announcement about the week and ways to participate is at https://peerreviewweek.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/prw-press-release1.pdf Deborah Sweet published a blog bost on CROSSTALK… - 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
Text recycling: Lightning talk summary
…these recommendations, see Moskovitz, A; Hansen, D, and Yelverton, M. Legalize Text Recycling. Learned Publishing, May 2023. Questions from the audience What impact do licensing arrangements have? Standard licences (such as Creative Commons) generally state the rights that anyone has to reuse the material as long as the original… - Case
Unauthorised reviewer challenges
A paper submitted to a journal with a single anonymous peer review policy was assigned to a prospective reviewer, who agreed to undertake the review. The reviewer then sent an email addressed to a number of different research group and institutional mailing lists calling for volunteers to review the paper. The reviewer attached the PDF of the paper, which had been downloaded from the submission… - Case
Academic freedom
A final year student, and two other researchers in law, all from the same university, undertook research into a recent court judgment on the rules in relation to civil servants making public comments. Based on this research, a manuscript was drafted to be submitted to a double anonymised peer reviewed journal. The manuscript is highly critical of the judgment’s reasoning and impact. All three a… - Case
Reviewer misconduct?
We have received threats of legal action from the authors of a manuscript rejected by our journal, henceforth referred to as journal A. These “aggrieved” authors claim that their manuscript was unfairly reviewed by a close competitor, who then used some of their findings in a paper subsequently published in journal B, without either attribution or citation. The “accused” scientist had in… - Case
Ethical concerns and the validity of documentation supplied by the authors
We became concerned that not all of the co-authors were aware of a research paper submitted to our journal due to the difficulty receiving responses from the email addresses that had been supplied and their nature, given that the authors all worked in a hospital/academic institution. Despite repeated requests and attempts we remained dissatisfied with the responses and did not feel certain that… - News
New: Chinese resources
…="https://publicationethics.org/files/Ethical_Guidlines_for_PeerReviewers_Chinese_Web.pdf">Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers Discussion document: What constitutes authorship? Flowcharts: Complete set of flowcharts - Case
Compromised peer review system in published papers
On noticing a high volume of submissions from corresponding author A, editor X flagged up concerns with the preferred reviewers being suggested and their comments. Author A had in most cases suggested the same preferred reviewers for each submission, preferred reviewer accounts had non-attributable email addresses, comments were being returned very quickly (within 24 hours) and were often…