- News
Letter from the COPE Chair: February 2021
…on this to follow. On 10 February, we delivered an online authorship cases workshop. This workshop will be repeated for different time zones on 24 February at 17.00-18.30pm (AWST)/9.00-10.30am (GMT). The topic of the COPE Forum on 23 March is book… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: September 2021
…legitimate for an editor to modify a reviewer’s comments. It also gives guidance on the level of editing and editing procedure which will support consistent, fair, and transparent editing practices. Peer Review Week, 20–24 September, is upon us once again. This year’s theme is the “multifaceted role of identity in peer review”. I’m sure many of you… - Case
Homeoprophylactic treatment of a zoonotic disease
This research article investigated the effect of the widespread administration of a homeoprophylactic preparation against a bacterial zoonotic disease in a developing country after a period of particularly heavy rainfall. The authors claim to have given this oral preparation to all members of the population over 1 year of age, in three provinces of the country where this disease is prevalent (o… - Case
Retraction notices: Who (if anyone) should be listed as author?
Publisher A has been developing an internal publisher style guide for retraction notices, but has not been able to find any obvious industry best practice when it comes to whether retractions should have an author byline, and if yes, who should be listed. Some retractions have no authors listed; others give 'The Editors of Journal X' as the author byline (in cases of retraction owing to author… - Event
COPE Forum: September 2023
…COPE Forum Do you have a publication ethics case you'd like to bring to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice? Submit a case The deadline to submit a case for this Forum is: Thursday 24 August 2023. Forum agenda On Thursday 7 September 2023 the COPE Forum will be held at 16:00-17:30 (BST / UTC+1) 1. Update on… - Case
Retracting a 'Just Accepted' article
We are nearing the completion of an investigation into an alleged fraudulent special issue of one of our journals. Someone impersonated legitimate Special Issue editors and invited papers from legitimate authors in the community. We discovered this alleged fraud while reaching out to the people who were listed as the Special Issue editors only to find out from them that they had nothing to do w… - Case
Publishing corrections for articles in inactive journals
Two articles published in 2006 and 2008 (by different author groups) had image integrity concerns that have been raised to the publisher. The journal verified independently that these image duplication concerns are valid and reached out to the corresponding authors first and upon not receiving a response subsequently sent emails to all authors multiple times. But due to the age of the pa… - Case
A breach of intellectual property rights?
We recently published article A by author group X on our website ahead of print publication and subsequently received a formal complaint from author group Y alleging that the paper constitutes a breach of their intellectual property rights. Group Y state that the described work is based on a jointly developed concept, initially resulting in a joint report (published 2004). In their view,… - Case
Request for removal from author list for reasons of religious belief
We have been contacted by an author of a published article who has requested to be removed from the author list. The author is third in the author list and is neither a lead author nor a corresponding author. The CRediT statement for the article reports that the author’s contribution to the work included investigation, validation, formal analysis and data curation. The author says that t… - 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 deta… FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…="_blank">https://peerj.com/about/preprints/policies-and-procedures/#retraction-policy Preprints.org https://www.preprints.org/instructions_for_authors#withdrawal This will be discussed at the start of the next COPE Forum on Monday 24 July 2017. Please do leave any comments below, whether or not you are planning on joining the meeting Comments are reviewed and, on approval, added…- News
In the news: September 2020
…Allies’ which provides best practices to address racial disparities in the scholarly publishing community. This is the first in a series of 3 ‘toolkits for equity’. The authors describe their experience of an active - Case
Registration of a randomised control trial
Journal A received a manuscript—a randomised, controlled, double anonymous, parallel clinical trial. The manuscript was reviewed by two specialist reviewers who suggested acceptance after revision. One of the important points that was asked was to provide the “registration number of the RCT”. As our journal is a member of the ICMJE, we reviewed the instructions of the ICMJE and found that there… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2021: Keynote address
…science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for the American Physical Society for nearly 24 years in their editorial office. Dan has been involved in all aspects of publishing including peer review, production, distribution, and personnel and financial management of journals. - Case
Should we retract a published paper with a high similarity match?
The journal published an original article in 2022. Recently, we received feedback from a third party that the paper is similar to the authors' other work published in 2019. The duplicate rate of the initial submission was 31% and the final version was 24% which is within the journal’s standard. The concern was that the paper may not add value as the authors have already published similar… - Case
Boundaries of duplicate submission
A paper was submitted to journal A. The reviewers were enthusiastic but raised substantive concerns. The editorial decision was 'reject with resubmission allowed', providing the authors the opportunity to submit a revision if they feel all concerns can be addressed. The authors elected to submit substantially the same report to journal B. The outcome was essentially the same; the paper was reje… - Case
Same cohort - same blood samples - multiple tests
This is a hypothetical situation based on a real-life experience. A set of authors recruited the same patient cohort, collected data with two questionnaires, took one blood sample, but tests were done by two research students for two pathogens, and the results were presented separately in two theses. Subsequently, they sent different papers to two journals. No plagiarism has been identif… - News
In the news: February Digest
…reviewers. Alan Sokal, the author of the op-ed suggests this is beyond common sense and that editors and reviewers are different than human subjects.https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/01/24/rules… Resources and further reading
…Education (ICME-2013), 2-6 October 2013, Balaclava, MauritiusKusal Das, International Advisory Group 2nd International Scientific Practical Conference "World-class scientific journal: problems, solutions, preparation and inclusion into citation indices and reference databases", 24-26 September 2013 and Innovative…Membership subscription fees
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