- News
Announcement of COPE Council elections
Due to vacancies on Council, we are seeking nominations for five new candidates. These are voluntary positions. Council is responsible for COPE’s policy and management. Council members are expected to attend four meetings a year (in London) as well as take part in subcommittees and other COPE related tasks. It may be possible to attend some meetings by phone. There are also occasional… - News
Announcement of COPE Council elections
Due to expansion of the size of COPE Council, we are seeking nominations for two new candidates. These are voluntary positions. Council is responsible for COPE’s policy and management. Council members are expected to attend four meetings a year (in London) as well as take part in subcommittees and other COPE related tasks. It may be possible to attend some meetings by phone. There are… Presentations
…2007. Presentations from 2006. Presentations from 2005. 2010 Introduction to COPE Download pdf (1.29mb) (uploaded 5 May 2010) Presented by Natalie Ridgeway- Case
Dispute between two authors
A manuscript was submitted by author A to our journal. The content of the paper was controversial. We sent this manuscript for peer review by two clinical reviewers. We wrote back to author A requesting major revisions to address the concerns and issues raised by the reviewers. A revised paper was submitted and accepted for publication. Because the article was controversial,… - Event
ALPSP: How Publishing Ethics Can Nurture Trust in Scholarly Publications
…by misbehaving authors (eg committing plagiarism or fraud), by abuse of editorial positions and also by conflicts between publishers’ and societies’ commercial interests and principles of editorial freedom and integrity. The course will cover how to detect and deal effectively with possible misconduct and show the importance of having sound ethical policies. While the principles and theories… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 4 December 2012: Citation manipulation
The topic for discussion at this Forum was ‘Citation manipulation’. The issue of self citation has been discussed in a number of places before. The focus here is on a form of citation manipulation that qualifies as coercion, where an editor or others affiliated with a journal pressure an author to add citations from that journal for the implied purpose of increasing citation rates and, by… - 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… - News
Election of COPE council members Autumn 2011
Voting for the 2 vacancies on COPE council is now open and will remain open until Friday 28 October 2011. All Full and Associate Members are entitled to vote. Please note: there is only one vote per journal title, even for journals with multiple editors. The vote should be cast by the Member editor, who isusually the Editor-in-Chief, or otherwise by the nominated contact for the journal. See… - News
Election of COPE council members May 2012
Voting for the 5 vacancies on COPE council is now open and will remain open until Wednesday 23 May 2012. All Full and Associate Members are entitled to vote. Please note: there is only one vote per journal title, even for journals with multiple editors. The vote should be cast by the Member editor, who is usually the Editor-in-Chief, or otherwise by the nominated contact for… - Case
Redundant publication
A complaint of redundant publication was made by a reader, who claimed that a second paper had been published in the journal, after the first had already been published elsewhere. No permission letter was obtained by the author of the second paper and the first paper had not been cited.… - News
COPE response to Science paper submission of fake paper, by Virginia Barbour, on behalf of COPE council
…href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1354" rel="nofollow">earlier discussion on this issue, journals such as this are the publishing equivalent of Nigerian banking scams. Second, that some of these questionable journals have managed to get themselves onto the lists of respected industry association bodies - including COPE. At COPE, some may have been included because they were in the lists of journals submitted by reputable… - Case
Obtaining consent for a study of people with severe learning disabilities
…Instead they had assumed ‘process consent’, whereby the participants made it clear if they did not wish to be interviewed. The editor was not reassured by this response. The paper was reviewed by an expert in research ethics who stated that, in such circumstances, consent should be obtained by proxy (ie from next of kin), and that ‘process consent’ is not a substitute for written informed consent by… - Case
Undeclared conflict of interest
…participants had been consecutively referred, they were, in fact, invited to participate. - The children reported were also part of another project funded by legal channels. - The results of the study were passed to lawyers before publication. - An important financial conflict of interest by the corresponding author, which would have influenced the judgments made of the paper at the time, was not declared to… - Case
Unethical research undertaken by a single handed GP
We have received a paper from a GP testing the hypotheses that because 24,25 cholecalciferol has a similar structure to commercially available statins, it may act as an inhibitor of HMA co-reductase. He screened 350 patients in his practice and identified 77 who had a cholesterol concentration above 6.5 mmol per litre. Thirty-three of them agreed to return for a second test 2 weeks later. They… - Case
Attempted dual publication
A study by Japanese authors was submitted to specialist journal A. The manuscript was sent to three reviewers, including expert X. After two weeks, expert X contacted the editorial office to say that an identical manuscript had been sent by the competing specialist journal B to expert Y in the same unit as expert X. Expert X and expert Y had compared and discussed both manuscripts. Expert… - Case
Dual publication and attempted retraction by the author
An author who published an article in Journal A at the end of the year wrote to advise that it would have to be retracted on the grounds that his PhD tutor, Professor X, had already submitted a similar manuscript more than a year earlier to another journal. In the absence of any contact from the tutor, the author had assumed that this manuscript had not been accepted and went ahead with her own… - Event
Peer review workshop
COPE members: join us for an online workshop during Peer Review Week. We will be working through peer review cases submitted by members, share in the discussion and suggest what the editor(s) should do next.… - Case
Paper submitted by a PR company without the knowledge of the authors
A paper was submitted for which there were seven contributors, but no corresponding author. The only identification of who had sent the paper was an accompanying e-mail from a public relations company. When contacted by the editorial office, the PR company confirmed that the paper was to be considered for possible publication. The named contributors were then contacted and asked whether they… - Case
A paper which discloses confidential material
…used by B which he could include in the editorial. He also suggested to B that he might wish to respond to the research letter if it were accepted. B did not reply, however, but at the end of March he submitted a paper to journal Z. This paper compared the screening programme run by B, with the suggested screening programmed detailed in the unpublished research letter by author A, and concluded that… - Case
Paper B plagiarised paper A: what to do if a journal does not respond?
The author X of a paper published by journal A complained to the editor-in-chief of journal A that his/her paper has been plagiarised by a paper that has been published later by journal B. Moreover, the authors of the paper in journal B allegedly did not respond to letters sent by author X asking for an explanation about the apparent plagiarism. The editor-in-chief of journal A compared…