- Case
Data source for study of questionable integrity and provenance
A journal recently handled a research paper related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper was deemed of interest and sent for external peer review. Because it accrued reasonably positive reviews it was scheduled for discussion at one of the weekly manuscript meetings where research editors and a statistician make final decisions on a number of papers. A few days before the meeting, it came… - Case
Should we allow pseudonymous authorship?
We are handling a manuscript that is now ready for acceptance. During the review process we noticed that one coauthor had the surname "999" and this coauthor and two others had the affiliation "Independent researcher". We asked the corresponding author what this meant. Their answer was that the names of two of these three authors, including "999", were pseudonyms. The paper was based on a compe… - Case
Ukrainian authors request retraction of article published in Russian conference proceedings
A journal has been contacted by a group of authors from Ukraine who wish to retract their article because of acute ethical issues in relation to the war with Russia. The authors are employees of a research institute in Ukraine. When preparing their article they were not fully informed about the country of the organisers of the conference. They are concerned that participation in a Russian confe… - Case
Plagiarism by a possible predatory journal
An article published in a journal in 2023 appears to have been plagiarised in a possible predatory journal but the publishers are unable to get a response from the predatory journal or affiliated Institute. The article (Article A) was submitted to Journal X in 2022 and published early in 2023. The authors reached out to the Journal after finding that another article dated from 2021 (Art… - News
Letter from COPE Vice-Chair: February 2020
This is my first opportunity to open the Digest, so welcome everyone. In this issue, we are releasing the final version of the COPE Strategy for 2020-2023. This document is the end product of months of hard work by your volunteers (COPE Council and Trustee Board) to develop a focus for the next three years.… - Case
Possible overlapping publications/data
As editor-in-chief of a journal (journal A), I was contacted by an individual (N) who indicated the following: authors of an article published in journal A were questioned as to the similarity of a figure and a table appearing in both journal A and in another journal (journal B). N noted that reanalysis of the data of the published work by the authors suggested errors and inconsistencies of the… - Case
Suspicion that signed informed consent forms are forged
A research paper was submitted to our journal and underwent several rounds of peer review and editorial curation. We were on the point of acceptance when we realised there were some images that were submitted along with the paper where patients were perfectly identifiable but we did not have the signed informed consent forms. We therefore asked the authors for the consent forms (corresponding t… - News
In the news: March 2018 Digest
…target="_blank">http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/26/1715374115 Conflicts of interest This article on COI in peer review concludes that journals should develop COI policies for reviewers and editors, as well as for authors - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: January 2019
…and plenary sessions: Plenary session on predatory publishing Symposium on Transparency 2025 A debate on preprints Focus track on responsible authorship Later in the year, we’re delighted to be joining COPE representatives in the Netherlands who will be hosting COPE’s European Seminar in the city of Leiden on 23 September 2019. We’ll give you… - Case
Profusion of copied text passages
…in the region of 25% to >35%. These are substantial values and certainly beyond fortuitous incidences. However, in almost all cases it is difficult to suspect acts of conscious (self)plagiarism as the copied text (ranging from single sentences or fragments of sentences to passages of 2–3 sentences) can be attributed to a very large number of sources: often more than 60, and in one case… - Case
Request for removal for one author but a coauthor cannot be reached
A journal accepted a paper but after receiving the decision letter, the corresponding author asked if one of the coauthors could be removed from the authorship list. This coauthor is now a prominent politician and felt that their new role would conflict with being an author on the paper. The journal informed the corresponding author that they would need written confirmation from… - News
In the news: August
…Authorship A Russian company, 123mi.ru, brokers authorship to papers that have already been accepted, but not published. The presumably legitimate paper authors submit a listing of their paper to the Russian company and offers additional authorship for a fee-more for a first author spot than middle author slots. They then ask the editorial office to add an author that was "forgotten" on initial… - Case
Undeclared author conflict of interest
A journal published a study related to a pilot programme run by an online mental health support resource which, at the time of publication, had a for-profit spinoff. At the time of the publication, this resource would share “anonymised” user data with the spinoff to create and market customer service software. Although this practice of sharing data has since been stopped, the authors of the man… - Seminars and webinars
Post-publication critiques
…="https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width/public/seminar23-webpage-post-pub-crit.jpg?itok=syKr4kux" width="1200" height="500" /> - Seminars and webinars
Handling a case of misconduct
…panel discussion" class="media-element file-full" data-delta="1" src="https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width/public/seminar23-webpage-misconduct-panel.jpg?itok=DhN3NRqx" width="1200" height="500" /> Publisher’s perspective Coromoto Power-Febres (Research Integrity Manager, Emerald Publishing) opens the discussion with a call… - News
In the news: April 2018 Digest
…there are some legitimate reasons for re-use and for now, even with the potential for scaled image evaluation, that it is important to “tread carefully” when examining image re-use or manipulationhttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/23/269415 Havard developing software to spot misused images in… - News
In the news: October-November 2021
…authorship on a paper, has been receiving attention recently. A recent article in Retraction Watch drew our attention to two sites, one in Iran and one in Latvia, that appeared to sell authorship slots on finished papers, whilst another site… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: May 2018
…Elsevier On May 23rd COPE and the Russell Group Integrity Forum have been invited to attend the annual meeting of UKRIO, the UK Research Integrity Office, to present our outcomes from the Birmingham meeting. During our presentation we will share why we believe that now is the right time to begin the conversation between… Publication ethics issues in AHSS: New study
…encountered by 55% of journal editors. Journal editors felt least confident in dealing with data and/or image fabrication issues (24%), fraudulent submissions (23%), and intellectual property and copyright issues (21%). There were no significant differences in the concerns reported by journal editors from different subject areas, or regionally, suggesting that many of the issues are…- Case
Two cases of double submission
Journal A is dealing with two separate cases of double submission: Case 1: Manuscript X was submitted to the journal. Two rounds of revision were suggested by the editor in charge, following comments by the referee, and an amended version was submitted. Following routine plagiarism detection checking, the editorial team found that a substantial part of the manuscript was similar to artic…