- Case
Author contacts editor-in-chief using personal phone number
This is an increasingly common scenario, with programmes now available to find personal details, and many opportunities to mine information from social media. It is good practice to perform periodic internet searches to see where your own information may appear, and take action to remove it where possible. Professional editors can be careful only to give out generic journal email addresses and… - Case
Ethics and consent in research
…consent procedures in the trial. Specifically, workers never provided informed consent that their tests, mandated by a company medical monitoring program, be used in any “research” study. His concerns were in four areas. (1) The researchers failed to inform both the company and the injured workers that they should have been removed from further exposures when their test results showed severe… - Case
Duplicate publication
Author X contacted the editor of Journal A to enquire whether the journal would be interested in a review of a new concept in the treatment of a disease, written by author X and two co-authors. Author X said that his co-authors had suggested writing the paper for another journal but he had convinced them to submit the paper to Journal A. The editor invited submission and, after peer review,… - Case
Claim from an author that his name should not have been included as author on a paper
…publication) claiming that he was not consulted about the paper and did not want to be a coauthor. We then removed the article from our website and from the upcoming print issue, pending resolution of the protest. We wrote to the corresponding author (Dr R) asking for an explanation, which she provided. The gist of the explanation was that Dr M objected to publication as a means of retribution, for… - Case
Dual submission and editor’s failure to take action
…to which he sent a two line reply asking as to what should be done. We suggested that the copyright of the article is still with us so he should remove the article from the journal’s website until the article is withdrawn in the correct manner. The editor has not taken any steps and the article is still displayed on the other journal’s website. Question(s) for the COPE Forum - News
Welcome to new COPE Council members
…Kong Rachel Safer Senior Publisher, Oxford University Press, US See all COPE Council Members… - Case
Author trap/fabrication detection
…should have considered handling the matter himself rather than passing it on to another journal. The chair of COPE agreed to contact the editor of the UK journal to determine if the issue of data fabrication is being investigated by them.… - Case
Retraction of article from 1994
…group of patients from a paper already published and a selected group of patients from professor A’s hospital that had not given consent to be part of a research project. Professor A has claimed that his patients were not part of a research project, since the treatment he gave them was available to all at that time. Both cases were handled by the national board of research misconduct at the time (in… - Discussion documents
How should editors respond to plagiarism? April 2011
…href="https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/u7141/Discussion%20document_0.pdf" target="_blank">How should editors respond to plagiarism? PDF 557 KB Questions for discussion Should we attempt to define different types of… Work with us
…Proceedings, and/or in Life Sciences, Engineering or Computer Science. with expertise in UK law or in finance. The candidate, or the organisation they represent, must have been an ordinary member of COPE for at least 1 year. More information and apply --> We welcome new volunteers from all…- Case
Developing novel approaches to improve the assessment of absolute risk among patients with cardiovascular disease
…proofs so that they could be compared with the original sent to Journal B. Under the circumstances, and following further discussion, the editors agreed they should pull both papers from publication and wrote to the senior author to inform him of this decision.… - Case
Palestinian refugee conditions
- There was no evidence of political bias, but it might have been possible to take a more careful approach, with more extensive peer review given the strong political context. - Medicine does not exist in a political vacuum and these issues need to be discussed and published.… - Case
Allegation of fraudulent publication
…B in 2001 was almost an exact copy of an article published in Journal C in 1990. The Editor of Journal A examined copies of the articles from Journals B and C and concluded that this appeared to be a case of plagiarism. How should the Editor of Journal A act in this situation, given that Journal A is not the victim of the alleged plagiarism and that Journal C has ceased… - Case
Handling undisclosed peer reviewer conflict
…during the peer review process on whether they had any conflicts of interest related to the research. The editor confirmed the reviewer had a valid email address. Question for the Forum What process should be undertaken when a peer reviewer does not disclose their relationships with a company, provides a suspicious review, and at the same time, where the authors (who… Publication ethics issues in AHSS: New study
…a range of resources to support journal editors and publishers on all aspects of ethical issues in research publishing. The study was commissioned to address perceptions within COPE that Arts, Humanities, and Social Science members may not consider COPE to be as relevant to them as to Science, Technology, Medicine members. This primary research project was the first COPE has carried out…- Seminars and webinars
European Seminar 2019: Exploring Publication Ethics Issues in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
…href="https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE%20Leiden%20HSS%20survey%20Sep%2019.pdf">See presentation … - News
Guest article: Inclusion in Scholarly Practice
…that we better understand how a very different spectrum of disciplines is confronting some new challenges—and some of the same, old challenges newly revealed. In so many aspects of our world we need to be thinking with the very tools that AHSS puts at our disposal, and in ways that will benefit our colleagues in STEM fields as well. Inclusion is not only about the who of our inquiry… - Case
Victim of article theft wants correction to list their name, not retraction
…preparation of the article for publication (submitting, revising, etc) and the author(s) who stole the paper may have made changes to the paper. The editor may wish to direct the author to their authorship criteria and peer review process to explain why transferring authorship is not appropriate. To prevent theft of a paper, one idea put forward was for the DOI to be reserved in advance, with the… - Case
Allegation of reviewer malpractice
The Editor provided a signed declaration stating the journal’s practice of asking authors to suggest reviewer(s) who may or may not be used for that purpose. The Editor’s declaration stated that the reviewer in question was nominated by the authors and that no competing interest was declared by either the authors or the reviewer.… - Case
Alleged plagiarism
…different authors and were not the sole provenance of that author. Although it is true that employers may have vested interests, this does not necessarily mean they are corrupt. The notion of conscious plagiarism implies that the plagiarism is intentional; unconscious plagiarism is unintentional. It is the former that attracts sanction, and the intention must be proven. The point of requesting an internal…