- News
Case Discussion: Inconclusive institutional investigation into authorship dispute - university perspective comment
…the most common ethical issues faced by journal editors of scholarly publications. As such, Authorship and Contributorship are areas where resources are continually evolving. Authorship disputes are also an issue where journal editors and publishers must rely on the authors themselves and their institutions to adjudicate the disagreements. Most of the related cases emphasize the point that… - News
In the news: October-November 2021
Each month, COPE Council members find and share publication ethics news. This month the news includes articles on authorship and contributorship, data and reproducibility, peer review, and diversity, equity and inclusion. - News
New Website goes live!
…publishers, authors and journalists: The editors’ section contains a new resource, the ‘Short Guide to Ethical Editing for New Editors’, this aims to summarize key issues for new editors and provides links to relevant pages of the COPE website as well as those of other organisations. Improved members’ section with an alphabetical search as well as country and publisher… - News
Collaboration
…in the Digest and include an upcoming workshop with the “Russell Group” and COPE members (mix of publishers and editors) to discuss research integrity and publication ethics. This is planned for April 2018 at Birmingham University, UK. A report will be produced following the workshop. COPE seminars are planned for China, Australia, North… - News
Thank you and farewell to Council Members
We say a fond farewell to our Council Members who have reached the end of their term with COPE and we would like to thank them for all the work they have done over the past few years. Between them, they have been involved in: leadership roles within COPE; developing guidance; speaking at events across the globe; translating resources; raising the profile of publication ethics in their… - News
Welcome to new COPE Council members
Following our recent elections, we're delighted to welcome six new Council Members to COPE. Each of our Council members brings their own experience, knowledge and skills to help us all work towards improving ethical practice in the publication of research in our community. Eleanor Gendle Executive Editor at The Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK - Case
Suspect author
…try and gather more evidence, perhaps by contacting the ethics committees who supposedly approved these studies. The editor may then be able to determine whether in fact the studies took place as reported. The Forum advised against informing the non-specialty journals at this point as there is no real evidence at this point, so it would be difficult for them to know what to do. The Forum also… - News
Conflicts of interest focus
…provides practical guidance to peer reviewers about disclosing their own conflicts of interest before and during peer review that may prevent an impartial review, including recent collaborations with or being at the same institution as an author. The - News
Vacancies on COPE Council
…role To be responsible, together with other Council Members, for the activities of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Key responsibilities Attend and take a full part in meetings of Council by webinar, and attend and take full part in the annual residential meeting Attend and contribute to quarterly Forum meetings by webinar… - News
WCRI 2019: Responsible authorship panel
…by an editor attempting to resolve a dispute prior to publishing a paper. From the institutional perspective there is a need for clear definitions and criteria of authorship at the institutional level, governed by national codes of ethical conduct, for a research integrity officer to effectively investigate a complaint. A clear process and procedure must also be followed, and all involved… Submitting a guest editorial or opinion piece to COPE
This policy provides information about writing a guest editorial (commissioned by COPE) or opinion article (uncommissioned) for publication in COPE Digest, and across COPE’s multimedia channels. Aims and scope We are looking to widen the scope of discourse regarding research and publication ethics in COPE membership communications by including voices and opinions…- 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 researc… - Case
Authorship dispute
The paper in question describes a collaborative study of several datasets (not all previously published). A putative referee was asked to review the paper and declined. However, this led to a written complaint asserting that (s)he should be an author as (s)he had made a significant contribution to some of the work described in the paper. After promising comments from referees, the existi… - Case
Duplicated gel images
A few months we were contacted by a dean of an institution who informed us about misconduct of one of the senior scientists in that institution. An investigation launched by the institution showed that author A and coauthors reused the same images to show controls in many figures in their different publications. This problem was found in three publications in our journal. We decided to… - Case
Author requests permission to publish review comments
…authors regarding the confidential treatment of reviews. We currently offer no such guidance to authors but we do link to our publisher’s guidelines on publication ethics on the submission site for the journal which states: “If discussions between an author, editor, and peer reviewer have taken place in confidence they should remain in confidence unless explicit consent has been given by all parties, or… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2021: Reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science: taxonomy considerations
…research misconduct, including analyses on retractions. He is also a member of the Committee for Ethics and Bioethics of Italy's CNR and of the Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity, for which he advises and investigates allegations of research misconduct. Is CrossMark star-crossed? What we've learned from trying to get publishers to do the same thing the same way - Forum discussion topics
Author behavioural misconduct
…“behavioural misconduct” should be considered a form of research misconduct. Resnik (2019) 3 argued that sexual harassment meets three of four legally enforceable ethical standards for the conduct of research, and some scholarly societies, journals, and institutions have already implemented 4, or are keen to implement, a research misconduct… - News
COPE position statement on inappropriate manipulation of peer review processes
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers. These manipulations appear to have been orchestrated by a number of third party agencies offering services to authors. This statement is issued on behalf of COPE after consultation with a variety of… - News
International Workshop for Journal Editors, Indonesia
…;type%5B%5D=Case&sort=score">peer review ethics. The audience was also introduced to the functions of COPE and its publicly available website resources. The second COPE session, held on the following day, was a 2-hour… - Case
Plagiarism
…copied verbatim were already present in it …” The corresponding author went on to say that he accepted full responsibility, would never again co-author an article with someone he didn’t know, and asked that his explanation be forwarded to the authors of the review articles with a further apology. The editor has taken no further action, but wants to know whether the head of department, the ethics…