- News
In the news: November 2018 Digest
…findings. COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read November Digest: Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections… Potential paper mills
…href="https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/02/21/the-tadpole-paper-mill/">Elisabeth Bik, who skilfully detect suspicious patterns. Although, once detected we do take steps to investigate and correct the scholarly records (eg, retraction or expression of concern), we need to ensure we prevent these papers being published in the first place. Paper mills are quick to adapt to publisher and journal requests and investigation processes, and continue to move the goalposts…- News
Case Discussion: Editor and reviewers requiring authors to cite their own work
…discussion document which will be ready, on our website, early this year. Nancy Chescheir on behalf of the COPE Education Subcommittee Read January 2019 COPE Digest newsletter and use the COPE… 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
Author did not see reviews or revisions to the manuscript and did not give approval for publication
Approximately 1 year after publication of an article, we received a letter from one of the authors saying that they had not seen the reviews of the paper, the revisions of the paper or approved the final manuscript for publication. This was subsequently confirmed by the other authors who said that contact with the complainant had “broken down” and that the corresponding author had indicated tha… - Case
Request to remove an author post-publication
A paper was submitted to a journal by authors A and B. The paper was accepted and then published in the journal. Several months after final publication, author A contacted the journal asking for their name and their biography to be removed from the article. Author A stated that they wished to distance themselves from the research. Author B also contacted the journal separately to… - News
In the news: May 2020
…encourage a proactive defence against the evolving predatory journals. http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-medicine/2020/04/21/we-need-to-develop-counter-adaptations-to-predatory-journals/ Transparency and Reproducibility The US National… - News
In the news: June 2018 Digest
…="_blank">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/05/29/alphabetical-name-ordering-is-discriminatory-and-harmful-to-collaborations/ Who qualifies as an author? A survey of over 6000 researchers in 21 scientific disciplines exposes a widely varied answer set to a seemingly simple question. About 90% noted that individuals who draft the paper or interpret the data would usually or almost always be included, but only about 60% felt that… - News
In the news: October Digest
…Bolland and others to investigate his work. Their findings and their pursuit of righting the published record over several years, has resulted to date in the retraction of 21 of 33 reports of Sato's clinical trials. But this is not just another report of research misconduct. Kupferschmidt illuminates the human toll on Avenell and Bolland in pursuit of the truth, collateral pain on Sato's co-author whose… - News
In the news: December Digest
…appears to have a weak understanding of the concept of academic freedom. The suspension has been lifted and the professor is now back on campus. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/11/21/investigation… - News
Standards in Authorship webinar summary
…="mailto:[email protected]?subject=Discussion%20document%20comments%3A%20What%20constitutes%20authorship%3F">feedback by email by Friday 21 July, 2017. Speaker presentations are now available on the COPE website. Watch and listen again to the - News
In the news: May 2021
…insight into how peer review has evolved in the 21st century. The authors discuss what the data can teach us about how the research culture is changing, in this blog. A new peer-review organisation, called… - News
In the news: September 2021
…href="https://www.davidworlock.com/2021/08/oa-from-orcs-to-octopus/">arc of change of STM publications from reader-pays, to author-pays, to funder-pays using the now-21 year old F1000 as a prime example for the latter. Peer review Surveys of authors and reviewers commonly find that authors highly value a rapid submission-to-publication timeline while reviewers commonly bemoan the short time allotted to complete reviews. There is commonly an… - News
Paper mills in the news
…-linked-to-a-paper-mill/">expressions of concern published by Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) in relation to 992 structures in its database which they discovered were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill. Another Retraction Watch article from February interviewed Adam Day, a data… - News
In the news: January 2019 Digest
…this could be rectified and argues the case for changing the cultural norms to allow this.https://psyarxiv.com/exmb2 COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read - News
Case Discussion: Ethics of non-active management of a control group
…Case summary Case 17-21 An article was submitted involving over 200 pregnant patients with a systemic illness (from 2010 to 2015) who were recruited and assigned to a control group or an active intervention group (of their systemic illness). The control group received routine antenatal… - News
In the news: March Digest
…contact you in March to discuss next steps. www.ohri.ca/journalology India’s University Grants Commission has new guidelines requiring universities to train PhD students on research and… - News
In the news: November 2020
…developing relevant cases, experiences, educational materials and good practice examples. Open access Scholastica surveyed 63 individuals working with scholarly society and university publishers about journal production and access approaches and… - News
In the news: June 2021
…clinical trials data availability, this letter to the Lancet expresses concerns on the availability of data from the Sputnik V phase 3 trial. Ethical oversight A number of articles have been published which address the identification, management and reporting of research… - Case
Reader concerns about ethics approval and consent from a vulnerable population
A reader raised concerns on social media about whether informed consent for research reported in a published article was obtained. An investigation by the journal resulted in the publication of a correction explaining that written, informed consent was obtained from the research participants. A separate, small group of researchers followed up and raised further questions regarding…