- Guidelines
Guidance for Editors: research, audit and service evaluations
…regulations. COPE Guidelines are formal COPE policy and are intended to advise editors and publishers on expected publication ethics practice. Guidance for Editors: research, audit and service evaluations - Case
Author requests for certain experts not to be included in the editorial process
…any conflicts of interest when commenting on a paper, so that their comments can be taken in the context of their conflict. If reviewers or editors do not feel they can be impartial, then they would be asked not to contribute to the editorial process for the paper. To provide further context, the author has submitted three papers to the journal previously, which have been rejected. The most… - Case
Ethics committee approval
The Forum noted that editors cannot be expected to know the national guidelines for the conduct of research in individual countries. It is up to authors to make sure that they comply with their national guidelines. One suggestion was that the national standards where the research was done should apply here, or the editor could make a judgement on his own national standards, in the country… - Case
The reviewer writes comments that he doesn’t want the author to see
A reviewer has written to complain that a review he sent to us on which he wrote “In confidence—not for transmission to author” was transmitted in part to the author. He had made some rather derogatory remarks which had been edited out by the editor before he had sent back the comments to the author. The review that remained was critical but unremarkable. (1) Is it acceptable for… - Case
Author accused of sexual harassment
…meaning there will be no permanent record. Therefore, as there is no official outcome, the Editor decided to continue to have the paper peer reviewed. Questions for the Forum Should the editor have behaved differently? For papers where authors have been accused of sexual misconduct should Editors/Journals decline to have the paper reviewed, or take… - Case
Removal of an author
…final version. If the author did not approve the final version, they should not remain on the author list and should be added as an acknowledgement—author C worked on this paper and is thanked for their contribution. Could efforts to contact author C be directed via the publishers to take independent steps that to try and contact author C (eg, via social media). The editor may wish to consider… - Case
Disagreement between authors and sponsor
…conduct an extensive internal one. The associate editor who had accepted the manuscript and a representative of the editorial board were asked to assess the company's claims and the authors' responses and they felt that the authors had satisfactorily answered the questions that had been raised. The company contacted the ethics committee of the authors' institution and reported their concerns. The… - Case
The single author, randomised controlled trial
…correspondent was also worried that there was no mention of other standard treatments. Advice was sought from a statistician and a gastroenterologist, both of whom raised serious doubts about the paper. The editor asked the chief executive of the hospital to investigate. Initially, the medical director of the hospital wrote to say that it would be impossible for them to investigate unless the journal was… - Case
Ethical status of authors’ actions?
…information arrived at during routine work, and how one should deal with the ethics of obtaining genuine informed consent from patients for a test that is being used to assess their honesty. The responsible editor thanked the authors for their swift reply, but pointed out that on purely scientific grounds the journal did not want to publish the study. What is COPE’s view of the ethics of the authors… - Case
Author did not see reviews or revisions to the manuscript and did not give approval for publication
…that all named authors had given their approval for publication (then current journal practice) but in truth had not explicitly sought the approval of the complainant. An additional relevant fact is that one of the authors was editor-in-chief of the journal at the time the paper was processed. The complainant did not wish the paper to be withdrawn but wanted the opportunity to publish a correction or… - News
Authorship and Contributorship focus: an editor view and research institution view
…particular note are the Discussion Document "What constitutes authorship?"; the position statement Responsible research publication: international standards for authors, the… - Case
Author misconduct
…can also list which authors have agreed to the retraction and so the editor was advised to contact the other authors and ask them for an explanation and see if they are aware of the situation. The Forum warned against publishing an expression of concern. An expression of concern should only be published if there is an unresolved, ongoing investigation or if the evidence is inconclusive. Most… - Case
Letter to the editor and retraction notice
A Letter to the Editor was submitted to Journal A – this Letter contained major criticisms of a paper previously published in Journal A, in particular of the statistical analysis underpinning the conclusions and the study design, and called for its retraction. The Editor sent the Letter out for peer review and some revisions were made by the authors. Based on both the content of the Letter and… Dealing with editor misconduct
…What problems, if any, do you foresee in implementing the code? What do you think the outcome will be for the author, editor, and for COPE? Comments Editors may want to make substantial editing changes as part of acceptance, or suggest ways in which the manuscript can be improved, including…- Case
The disappearing authors
…a competing interest in the published paper. The correspondent claims that the single author insisted that all the other researchers sign an agreement transferring all intellectual property rights to him before they could be included as authors on the second paper. The correspondent added that the author had already been investigated by his university for ethical issues related to his research and was also… - Case
Withdrawal of paper at proof stage
An original paper was submitted to our journal. After peer review, the authors were requested to revise the paper, and the revision was submitted back to the journal. Our manuscript editor accepted the paper. The paper was scheduled for publication 3 months later after copyediting was completed. We informed the corresponding author about acceptance of the paper and sent them the… - Case
Request for removal from author list for reasons of religious belief
…contribution would still need to be acknowledged in anonymous form. It is not possible to remove an author entirely from their responsibility for the article’s content. On question 3, the COPE flowchart on removing authors after publication indicates that it should be the editor who contacts the… - Case
A lost author and a new hypothesis
A paper was published in January 1998,and seven authors were credited. B was thanked for his contribution in the acknowledgements section. One year later B wrote to the editor, outlining two alleged incidents related to this paper. First, the cohort reported in the January 1998 paper was one that B had been working on since the early 1990s. In 1992–3 he sought collaboration with another… - Case
Who ensures the integrity of the editor?
An editor came across a letter from the editor-in-chief of his journal to a reviewer that asserted he had recommended the acceptance of a manuscript. He had in fact recommended the opposite, both verbally and in writing. The paper in question was a guideline on the therapeutic choices for a relatively common medical condition. The authors had claimed their conclusions and therapeutic… - Case
A claim of stolen data and a demand for retractions
The publishers received an email from author B about a recently published paper, which passed peer review and had been available online for about a month. In this email, author B claimed that he and another colleague C had determined the peptide sequence in question and had not published it yet, nor given permission for it to be published. He claimed that author A had access to his unpublished…