COPE Forum
…peer review, editing of reviewer comments Predatory publishing Ethical considerations around book publishing- News
Artificial intelligence and authorship
…users have pointed to examples where ChatGPT has misattributed or fabricated citations suggesting that its training data leans towards a fairly free and easy attitude to plagiarism. On the other hand, as it learns on more refined sets of… - News
In the news: December 2018 Digest
…="http://retractionwatch.com/2018/11/28/majority-of-journals-editorial-board-resigns-after-publishers-handling-of-letter-about-move-to-open-access/" target="_blank">editorial. A Corrigendum was issued after legal threats by copyright holders of a mobile app who demanded new acknowledgements, references and warnings to be added. Interestingly, the… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: December 2019
…of our members and the larger scholarly community in the coming years. We send you all best wishes for the New Year. COPE Chair Deborah Poff… - News
Letter from the COPE Vice-Chair: August 2020
This month we welcome Simon Linacre as our newest Trustee. Simon brings extensive experience in scholarly publishing (predatory publishing, open access, and book publishing), and in business and marketing. With over 20 years’ experience in the industry, we know that Simon will be an outstanding Trustee and we look forward… - Case
Arm twisting an editor
A paper was accepted, pending a revised version, which made use of official government information on reported health reactions in a particular age group over a 20 year period. Two of the authors were academics and two worked for the government’s health department. When the revision arrived, the names of the latter two authors were missing. One of them explained that they could not reach… - 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… - Case
Publishing corrections for articles in inactive journals
…be possible to adequately follow due process of contacting authors given some may have retired or passed away? How best as a scholarly community can we approach potential concerns in papers that may now be 20+ years since they were published? … Presentations
…2007. Presentations from 2006. Presentations from 2005. 2010 Introduction to COPE Download pdf (1.29mb) (uploaded 5 May 2010) Presented by Natalie Ridgeway- 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… - Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around book publishing
…technology to access individual chapters, without accessing the whole book, so ethical statements on a chapter level is desirable. Who is responsible for ethics in book publishing? If journal articles are published with a CC-BY license, can the author publish a similar article in a book as a chapter? From a copyright legal perspective this is allowed, as long as… - News
Research Integrity, Sixth Report of Session 2017-19 from the House of Commons
Following a 10 month inquiry, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued recommendations to strengthen requirements and improve compliance with the existing 2012 Concordat to Support Research Integrity [full report]. Compliance with new and existing standards… - Case
Community leaders’ consent as a proxy for individual consent
A study was submitted that reported the prevalence of an intestinal infection in a tribal community. The authors did not obtain informed individual consent for stool collection from the study participants; instead they obtained consent from the leaders of each village. The study protocol was approved by the national IRB, but the protocol made no specific mention of stool collection—it referred… - Case
Inadequate reporting of a trial, despite earlier rejection from a different journal
We have been contacted by a reviewer after he spotted a paper he had reviewed for us (journal 1) now published in a second journal (journal 2). Both journals are members of COPE. The reviewer had advised we reject the paper when it was sent to him to review in September 2008. This was based on his assessment of the paper and also the supplementary material he was sent by us: protocol, CONSORT s… - Case
Retract, correct, or both?
Like many journals, we do not collect actual signatures of each co-author, asking the corresponding author to declare on a form that, among other things, he/she has the authority to submit on behalf of the others A paper was published in our journal in April 2010. Shortly afterwards, we were contacted by one of the authors saying that he and his colleagues had been unaware of the existen… - Case
Lack of acknowledgement of contributor
Our case relates to a paper (by author’s A and B) that was retracted because of lack of acknowledgement of the contribution of another author (C). The retraction statement noted: “While the A/B paper is largely the work of A and B, it includes some sentences and ideas that previously appeared in an unpublished paper and/or Power Point presentation only with A and C listed as authors. We regret… - Case
Falsified references
An article was submitted to my journal and was sent for peer review. An editorial board member realised that a number of the references were incorrect: publication dates had been changed to make them more current. The author was contacted by email and telephone who said he/she had a number of students working for him (who were not listed as authors or in the acknowledgment) and they must… - Case
Change in author’s name after publication
…publications are traced back to this unique identifier. On a show of hands, the majority (15) of the Forum said they would not change the name and 10 said they would.…