- Case
A survey of doctors’ opinions, with no IRB approval or written consent
A doctor who trained in country A took the licensing examinations in country B because he wished to work in country B. After the examinations, he carried out a survey (with a very poor response rate) of other doctors who had taken the same national licensing examination. The survey asked four major questions: How representative was the examination relative to the scope of your reading?… - Case
Seven plagiarized manuscripts in one month by the same corresponding author
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance. Council would caution that the editor has an obligation… - Case
Multiple complainants for a single article
…provided sufficient grounds for concern about the article then there is no need to correspond with them further. Related resources Responding to whistleblowers when concerns are raised directly, COPE flowchart - Case
Image manipulation as a general practice
…permission). On a poll of the Forum, less than half of the delegates said that they screen for image manipulation. COPE has an eLearning module on image manipulation. Also, Mike Rosner has written extensively on this topic (Journal of Cell Biology 2004;166:11–15 http://jcb.rupress.org/content/166/1/11.full)… Consensus statement on research misconduct in the UK by COPE and BMJ
…About this resource BMJ 2012;344 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e1111 Cite this as: BMJ 2012;344:e1111 © BMJ Publishing Group Ltd 2012 For personal use only: See rights and reprints at BMJ permissions. Related resources- Event
5th World Conference on Research Integrity
…University, USA) proposal for a system of self-retraction for honest error and the issues involved. Various view points from different stakeholders will be discussed. Speakers are: Richard Mann (University of Leeds, UK), Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) and Ginny Barbour (Chair, COPE). If you are attending the WCRI, these sessions are open to all delegates. - News
COPE Members: update your details
It’s a new year and time for fresh starts, including making sure your COPE member details are up to date. Have you had a change of staff? New staff join your journal? Or changed your work email contacts? It’s quick and easy to update your details and ensure you and your colleagues can access all COPE resources: - News
COPE workshop August 2019: Santiago, Chile
…Associate professor of Universidad de Santiago de Chile) and Iria del Río (editor of Revista Española de Cardiología). The workshop was a success with an attendance of over 40 editors from Chile and other South American countries. There was strong interest in publication ethics and a real need for education and discussion. The forum will be repeated next year… - Discussion documents
Addressing ethics complaints from complainants who submit multiple issues
…class="resource-download-inline__description"> Addressing ethics complaints from complainants who submit multiple issues. PDF 143 KB - Event
COPE Lightning Talk: Text recycling in research writing
17 April 2024, 13:00-14:00 BST / UTC+1 COPE Members only Clarifying the legalities for authors and editors Over the past six years, the Text Recycling Research Project has conducted empirical studies to better understand text recycling in the research context and used what they’ve learned to develop… - Case
Author of rejected paper publicly names and criticises peer reviewer
…exemplars to help reviewers to identify conflicts of interest. For example, if a researcher has built a career on a particular view and are ‘famous’ for holding that view, that could be a conflict of interest. The advice was to ensure that the journal’s guidelines to reviewers regarding conflicts of interest are up to date. The COPE discussion document may be helpful in this regard ( - Forum discussion topics
Claiming institutional affiliations
…collecting so that the data can be registered accurately. Databases of persistent identifiers such as the Ringgold Identity Database may be of use to publishers in tracking and identifying institutional affiliations. Ringgold Database identifiers can be linked to the International Standard Name Identifier database and via… - News
Presentations from COPE 2013 Asia-Pacific Seminar now online
…line-height: 18px;"> All the presentations can be found here … - Event
COPE Forum
…experience to the discussion: Preprints: what are the issues? Forum agenda and materials The agenda for the COPE Forum on Monday 24 July: 1. Update on COPE activities by the Chair 2. Forum discussion: Preprints: what are the issues? 3. New cases 17-11 Authorship dispute… - News
Research Data: Institutions are key to management and post-publication concerns
…required to secure the research record and ensure proper procedures are followed. A call to the RIO, even to discuss hypothetical concerns, is likely to be beneficial. Another article in this issue details the development of a RIO directory by the Association of Research Integrity Officers (ARIO), to… - Case
Institutional review board approval needed?
The Forum noted that institutional review board approval was the topic for discussion at the previous COPE Forum on 8 July 2014. A summary of the discussion and comments can be found on the COPE website (http://publicationethics.org/files/u661/Foruum_Discussion_Summary_Fair%20… - Case
Retraction notices: Who (if anyone) should be listed as author?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance. There does not appear to be an agreed standard for who… - Case
Publication of data without permission
A director of an institute in France has expressed concern about a paper published in our journal. One of the authors (not the corresponding author) of the paper, person A, visited his laboratory in France for 5 months in 2009 to carry out some work. The director says that some methods used and results obtained in his laboratory have now been included in the paper without his knowledge or permi… - Case
Author retracts request to be removed from author list
…href="https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines">Retraction Guidelines states that: 'Authors sometimes request that articles are retracted when authorship is disputed after publication. If there is no reason to doubt the validity of the findings or the reliability of the data, it is not appropriate to retract a publication solely on the grounds of an authorship dispute. In such cases, the editor should inform those involved in the dispute that… - Case
Authorship dispute
A paper submitted to an international medical journal was reviewed externally and the authors were subsequently invited to submit a revised version. The initial submission included authors from two different research institutions and one author from a corporate sponsor. The initial submission was accompanied by an appropriate description of the individual authors’ contributions, a negative conf…