- News
Appointment of new COPE Ombudsman
…its members; appeals against COPE rulings or advice relating to complaints against COPE members for not following the COPE codes of conduct for editors and publishers; or if two or more members cannot agree on how to handle a complaint involving both their publications.… - Webform
Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee
The primary role of the Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee is not to adjudicate complaints, but instead to facilitate the resolution of disputes in a manner that is consistent with COPE's mission. PLEASE NOTE: COPE will only consider complaints or concerns… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 11 September 2012: Publishing offensive material
The topic for discussion at this Forum was ‘Publishing offensive material’. Specifically, what constitutes bad taste, indecency or obscenity? How do you deal with expletives (as part of interviews or transcripts)? Where is the line between censorship and freedom of expression? - Forum discussion topics
Coordinating multi-journal complaints
June 2021 When and how to involve multiple journals and publishers in dealing with complaints from whistleblowers Complaints received from whistleblowers can develop into large investigations with multiple journals, editors, and publishers involved. Such complaints may involve many articles from a single author group or multiple… - Case
Fraud or sloppiness in a submitted manuscript
…illustrating the procedure in both manuscripts are identical. The reference list is identical. I can think of only two ways to make sense of this submission: sloppiness or fraud. Under the sloppiness assumption, the authors would have submitted a text referring to their randomised control trial and tables, referring to an earlier observational study. This is conceivable mostly because it is hard to… - News
Case discussion: Possible breach of reviewer confidentiality
…reviewing to their colleagues or students, and this is a breach of confidentiality. There may have been such a breach at any of the other three journals or even during review at grant application stage. The Forum agreed that the editor had handled the complaint appropriately. The editor added that the journal’s instructions were clear about respecting confidentiality and informing the journal if other… - News
Complaints and Appeals focus
COPE’s core practice # 3 recommends that: “Journals should have a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher.” Such complaints can take many forms (there are 133 cases in the COPE case database), some fairly… - News
Revised Good Publication Practice guidelines published
…2022 guidelines provide international ethical and practical recommendations for key stakeholders involved in publishing or presenting company-sponsored biomedical research. Updates reflect developments in the areas of scholarly publishing, biomedical publishing, human trial registration, and roles of publication professionals that have occurred since the publication of GPP3 in 2015. The main… Artificial intelligence (AI) in decision making: Forum discussion topic November 2019
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has advanced steadily over the past several years, and has started to introduce data-driven solutions to many processes throughout the publication process. AI tools can be developed to provide guidance to humans based on relevant data, or AI may lend toward automation of some processes without human intervention. Some processes already being considered…- Case
Potential image integrity flags on 15-year-old published papers
Journals are receiving increasing numbers of requests like this from readers asking for action to be taken on old papers. The difficulty is that the data are often unretrievable (for example, if the author has died), or have been digitised from an analogue format and are very poor quality. In such cases it may not be possible to establish definitively if falsification or fabrication has taken… FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: Sharing of information among editors-in-chief regarding possible misconduct
….1111/%28ISSN%291365-2044/homep...) Discussions with publishers suggest that such sharing of information risks accusations and/or legal claims of defamation, since submissions should be handled confidentially, even though the journals concerned might carry a statement on their website saying that manuscripts and related documents may be shared if that is considered necessary to investigate possible…- Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 4 September 2013: Sharing of information among editors-in-chief regarding possible misconduct
…/editorial_policies.htm">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/13652044/homepage/editorial_policies.htm). Discussions with publishers suggest that such sharing of information risks accusations and/or legal claims of defamation, since submissions should be handled confidentially – even though the journals concerned might carry a statement on their website saying that manuscripts and related documents may be shared if that's considered necessary to… - Case
Duplicate publication in a predatory journal
…article taken down, but have asked the editor to proceed with their journal’s usual review processes. The journal would not normally consider or publish a paper already published elsewhere but have not encountered this situation where a predatory journal has published something against an author's will (and presumably without any quality control, peer review, etc). It is possible that the… - News
FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…Forum discussion topic this month is around Predatory Publishing. Add your comments to the discussion below (non-members also welcome to comment): What are the issues? Predatory publishing is generally defined as for-profit open access journal publication of scholarly articles without the benefit of peer review by experts in the field or the usual… - News
A PLACE for publishers
Over the past few months we have been working with Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) to build a hub for publishers with limited resources or little experience, to easily discover resources from each of the… - Case
Unethical research
We have received a study in which patients with healed duodenal ulcers were randomly allocated to treatment with either placebo or ranitidine. Patients were also categorised as to whether they were type A or type B personality; the hypotheses being tested was that patients who were type A might be more likely to relapse. Patients did not have their H pylori status determined. Subjects… - Forum discussion topics
Ethical aspects of conference proceedings
…journals, standalone books, book series or collections of summaries or abstracts. A comprehensive definition is difficult due to the range of forms and conventions that are used, but a working definition might be: Conference proceedings are a record of a conference, congress, symposium, or other similar academic meeting, often including abstracts, reports of papers or full text papers submitted by the… - News
Case discussion: critiques after publication
…for the COPE Forum Is there a time limit for considering critiques on published research? Is there a time interval for retracting an article or issuing an expression of concern? Forum advice and follow-up The Forum drew the distinction between (1) setting time limits for receiving and publishing post-publication critiques and author replies, and (2)… FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…Prior publication and theses Research higher degree theses have traditionally been seen as part of the scholarly communications chain, and have been made available by university libraries in print and, latterly, online via institutional repositories. The issue we seek to address is whether or not work already publicly available in a thesis (whether in print or online, although…Terms and conditions
…Articles of Association. Members will be research universities or institutions where original research is conducted and where the results are disseminated through standard scholarly channels. Membership is at the discretion of the Trustee Board. Membership application and acceptance The membership contract will come into effect when the…