- Case
Retraction of false authorship
…about 30 miles away from Hospital A. - Should Dr. X's current employers be informed of the incident or should the actions of Hospital A be deemed adequate? - Should Dr X’s regulatory body be informed of the incident?… - Case
Possible malpractice revealed in a case report
We received a case report describing the diagnosis and treatment of a middle-aged woman who presented to a gastroenterology service in England with weight loss and a right iliac fossa mass. The authors did a barium swallow, duodenal and gastric biopsies, and diagnosed Crohn’s disease by the radiological appearances on follow-through. They did not do a colonoscopy, or biopsy the mass in the… - Case
A case report of an experimental therapy, submitted by the patient
…of heart disease. The presubmission enquiry stated: “This experimental treatment was at all times under the supervision and with the consent and approval of several cardiologists, a cardiac surgeon and a neurologist.” But there was no mention of whether the patient had consented to receive this “experimental treatment” or whether an ethics committee had approved the n of 1 experiment. - Case
Author trap/fabrication detection
…use or for use in clinical trials at the time when the paper was submitted. The author also mentioned using tests that were not available in our country at that time. The author was advised that his paper was excellent and therefore he should publish it in a UK journal. The author took the advice. I contacted the editor of the UK journal and warned him about the author. The UK journal… - Case
An investigation into results that were “almost too good to be true”
…conclusions were true and that there was no evidence of misconduct. Does COPE have any comments or suggestions regarding the journal’s actions?… - Case
Dual publication
…duplicate publication (ie, if he can review the translated published paper and determine the degree of overlap between the two papers), then he should re-instate the paper on the website along with a notice of duplicate publication. The editor should follow the flowchart on ‘Suspected redundant publication in a published article’. He should contact the authors for an explanation. If no response or an… - Case
Query about errata
…being made aware that what they are reading is not the article as originally published (or in the case of a retraction, why it is no longer to be found as published)? Corrections should always be linked to the original article. Medline and PubMed have mechanisms to do just that. Regarding the precise mechanism, that may depend on the technologies employed by the journal and what is possible. We… - Case
Retraction of article and accompanying editorial
The authors of a published article have asked to have an article retracted for internal policy reasons. However, we have solicited and published an editorial which accompanies this article and specifically references it within the text. We are unsure how to handle this. Question for COPE Council Does COPE have any policy or protocol for cases like this? … - News
In the news: April 2020
…issued 2 policies that will have significant influence on STEM researchers and higher education evaluation systems. These reduce the burden of "publish or perish" by eliminating or reducing emphasis on the Journal Impact Factor and Science Citation Index of published work in recruitment and promotion actions. Publishing in high quality Chinese journals will be expected. - News
In the news: June Digest
…-and-closed-what-do-reverse-flips-tell-us-about-the-scholarly-publishing-landscape/" target="_blank">https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/05/13/open-and-closed-what-do-reverse-flips-tell-us-about-the-scholarly-publishing-landscape/ In two Scholarly Kitchen posts, the idea of "Transformative Agreements" as that term relates to agreements between publishers and libraries or library consortia is discussed. Hinchliff gives this overarching definition: "a contract… Foreword, COPE Report 2005
…interested in publication ethics, with an extensive archive covering the whole gamut of issues from redundant publication, undeclared conflicts of interest, authorship disputes, plagiarism, and data fabrication. From the start, COPE’s emphasis has been on the misdemeanours of authors and peer reviewers. But editors behave badly too, or simply make…FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…following questions: Should researchers be required now to make their data available as a condition of publishing? Who should disseminate guidelines and/or monitor data sharing practices? What issues surround the re-use of published data? Should data deposited by authors be subject to peer review? Prior to publication? To settle disputing claims about results? For…- News
Letter from COPE Vice-Chair: February 2020
…href="https://publicationethics.org/events/cope-forum-friday-6-march-2020">joining the Forum or posting a comment on our website. COPE is now assigning DOIs (digital object identifiers) to our resources. This will help make our resources more discoverable and the link will point to the most up to date version. Please use the DOI if your journal or website links to… - News
COPE collaboration with FORCE11 Working Group
…develop or refine their policies, and to help editors handle individual situations they encounter. In line with our goal to support our members by providing practical resources, COPE is collaborating with the newly formed FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group (WG) to lead the development of standards for research… - Case
Reviewer misconduct?
We have received threats of legal action from the authors of a manuscript rejected by our journal, henceforth referred to as journal A. These “aggrieved” authors claim that their manuscript was unfairly reviewed by a close competitor, who then used some of their findings in a paper subsequently published in journal B, without either attribution or citation. The “accused” scientist had… - Case
Alleged misuse of confidential information
…submission independently replicated the mapping data of the earlier paper and proceeded to identify the gene by exome sequencing, a technology that had become widely available since the publication of the mapping paper in 2006. Since the mapping was independently replicated, the methodology used would have been sufficient to identify the gene whether any prior knowledge was available or not. Author… - Case
Ethical concerns and the validity of documentation supplied by the authors
…authors. Claims about forged signatures need to be backed up by a report of handwriting analysis (or if you can't supply that you should not make the accusation directly). The journal should consider taking legal advice.You may want to pursue this issue further to a higher institutional level. Hence, in addition to the hospital director, if there is another head of the academic institution or some… - Case
The ethics of self-experimentation
…of interest.— The need for IRB or ethics committee approval would totally exclude from publication any self-experimentation research performed by an independent researcher because they will not have access to any ethics committee or institutional review board. This would have prevented the publication of reports of highly useful reports ( - Case
Request by organisation to retract article and publish expression of concern
…a “publication ethics” position here, besides that contained within its regular guidance for publishing (ie, to manage transparency, permissions, conflicts of interest, etc). Publishing letters or debate papers would make the process transparent. If the journal decides to publish the letters, the Forum recommended ensuring that the letter from the organisation is signed by an individual or individuals. The… - News
In the news: October 2018 Digest
…principles. These include: Autonomy, Justice, beneficence, non-malfeasance. I’ll point out a few examples of these principles as they apply to journal management, and then highlight resources that touch on Journal Management. Autonomy: During the revision process, do the journal editors require major new analyses, inclusion of citations for their own journal to boost impact factor, or in other…