- News
Letter from the COPE Chair: December 2020
…events over the year. Most recently, Matt Hodgkinson spoke on behalf of COPE at the #ISMTEGlobal event on citation manipulation. Matt explored the ethics of citations, and how citation manipulation undermines research integrity, from excessive self-citation, to citation rings, coercive reviewers, and editors. How… - Case
An accusation of racism
…forwarded to the lead author. How should the editors respond now? Should the publishing group respond to this inferred accusation of racism?… - News
In the news: June Digest
…target="_blank">https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/04/23/transformative-agreements/ A month later, she further explores how such transformative agreements are disrupting agreements in library consortia due to conflicts about how the costs of these agreements are distributed among its members. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019… - Case
Potentially unethical publication
A new Editor was appointed to a society journal in a minority medical specialty. An officer of the society immediately handed him an anonymous letter from a reader of the journal complaining that an article recently published was unethical. The Editor is a personal friend both of the previous editor who accepted the paper, and the author of the paper. The paper is by a single author who gives… Self-Citation - Forum discussion November 2017
…considered to be a potential attempt to manipulate an author’s own h-index. So where’s the line? What is a peer reviewer’s responsibility in terms of calling out self-citation? While journals often expect that reviewers will read a paper inside and out, front to back, how much time does a peer reviewer actually spend looking at the reference list? And even if they do…- Event
Scientific symposium and 4th EQUATOR Annual Lecture
Equator would like to invite you to the scientific symposium and 4th EQUATOR Annual Lecture organised by the EQUATOR Network and the German Cochrane Centre. The symposium will be of great interest to health research scientists and clinicians, journal editors and peer reviewers, reporting guideline developers, publishers, research funders and other professionals involved in research… - Case
Case histories and post publication debate
…their respective journals?• Are the steps taken/planned reasonable?• Does the Forum have additional advice on how we can avoid such problems in the future?… Artificial intelligence (AI) in decision making: Forum discussion topic November 2019
…for AI intervention include: journal selection, topic identification, reviewer suggestion, scope assessment, text duplication checking, and statistical analyses; however, this is not a comprehensive list of AI options, and the opportunities for AI use are expanding at a rapid rate. With the advancement of AI, questions surrounding the relevant ethics arise as to if, when, and how AI…- Event
ISMTE North American Conference
Heather Tierney, COPE Council member, is presenting at the ISMTE conference in Baltimore on the following topics: Plenary Session 1: Preprints, Authorship Transparency, Bias in Peer Review August 2nd, 4.30-5.15pm Plenary Session 3: Transparency in Co-Authorship August 3, 12.00-12.45pm - News
COPE delegation, Beijing, 2017
…editors. CAS NSL holds several such seminars a year, often in partnership with publishers. The delegation had a wide ranging and productive meeting with CAST (Chinese Association of Science and Technology). CAST has made a comprehensive effort to tackle the misconduct problems in China, having tailored their response specifically to China,… - News
Reflections on the COPE North American Seminar 2019
…follow. Michael V. Dougherty, Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Dominican University, also presented his research on authorship violations in philosophy. Some of the most interesting findings included a new type of “compression plagiarism” that is unique to AHSS where many scholarly works are released in book or monograph format. It is possible but very time consuming to identify short papers that… - News
In the news: April 2020
…target="_blank">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/581892v2 Open Science/Open Humanities Just over 60 of about 400 mostly European research funders responding to a 2019 survey of their policies regarding open science and how they reward and incentivise their researchers to adopt open practices. While in general, the agencies and organisations favour greater openness, the extent of which they have operationalised this… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: April 2022
…Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. More information will follow shortly. COPE will also be well represented at the World Conference on Research Integrity. I will be moderating a session on “When and how to report to institutions, journals, publishers, or elsewhere.” This session will explore the available resources and the barriers to reporting… - Case
Duplicate publication and removal of article
…Question(s) for the COPE Forum• Should journal A publish an ‘Expression of concern’ to highlight the duplicate publication in the past. However, the article in journal B is no longer available. Perhaps a comment in the comments system of journal A would suffice? COPE does not seem to have clear guidelines in one place on how and when to use Expressions of concern (although we appreciate… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: September 2021
…interested in attending. This year’s theme is “Together shaping the future of publication ethics”. Topics include issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), authorship, use of AI in publishing, reducing the spread of retracted science, ethical practices in book publishing, and issues related to research data publication. The latter topic on research data is especially timely because… - News
Liz Wager discusses retractions in the BMJ
Liz Wager's recent blog in the BMJ discusss how tricky retractions can be, such as a recent one where the retraction was requested by the company who funded the study and whose employees carried out the research. Although there were some errors in the study, the conclusions were valid. (Liz Wager, Trouble with retractions,1 July: - Case
Was this study unethical?
…would be better off if the study had not been conducted. S/he wrote that the letter seemed to argue against any controlled trial to reduce children's exposure to SHS, but that there were several dozen of these in the published literature. The questions are twofold: was this an unethical study? And, if so, how should the journal proceed?… - Case
Ethical conduct of qualitative research studies
…whether to develop policies that offer an alternative to Ethics Committee approval. For example, the journal could consider requiring all authors of market research studies which involve human subjects to submit an ethics statement (for example, as an appendix, as supplementary material, or as a separate document linked to the article). This statement could include how the authors handled consent (to… - News
Editor to Editor support for Journal Management
…with a formal COPE forum that was well-received by all in attendance. Starting in the early 2000s, INANE became a true bellwether touchstone for nursing journal editors, bringing to the forefront effective approaches to meet the immense challenges of journal publishing in the digital age. Managing a scientific journal in a practice discipline such as nursing has always presented a delicate balancing… - Case
Scientific misconduct claim from a whistleblower where the institution will not investigate
…whistleblower. Institution-2 responded by saying that the authors believed there was an initial problem with the data used, but these had been updated and were not fabricated. Institution-2, however, was not the institution that carried out the experiments in question. The editors made the decision to obtain more information. On resubmission of the paper, the three original reviewers looked at the…