2020

An author published an article in journal A. At the proofreading stage they were asked by the publisher to reduce the number of words in the abstract. After publication, the author indicated that they had inadvertently included the wrong abstract in the proofreading correction step, supplying one which belonged to another article they had authored. The article is now published with the wrong abstract. The author is asking for a retraction and republication.

An author's institution requires that authors publish a set amount of times per year in journals that are indexed by Scopus in order to retain their tenure. The author submits to an open access journal and their paper is published after processing charges are paid. After publication the journal is dropped from the Scopus index. The author asks for the paper to be withdrawn by the journal so that they can submit to a different journal that meets their institution’s requirements. 

A journal received an article submission from two authors. The paper went through several revisions over the course of a year, and was eventually accepted for publication. The authors were informed about acceptance and the paper was sent for copyediting. The editorial office subsequently sent the final version of the paper to the authors for proofreading. 

Publisher A has been developing an internal publisher style guide for retraction notices, but has not been able to find any obvious industry best practice when it comes to whether retractions should have an author byline, and if yes, who should be listed.

A journal has received comments linked to a research paper that later has been retracted. This has led to a debate over whether there should be some notification beyond the link to the actual retracted paper. 

Questions for COPE Council

• Should the comments themselves be retracted? 
• What does COPE recommend?
• What do other journals do?
   

A journal recently handled a research paper related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper was deemed of interest and sent for external peer review. Because it accrued reasonably positive reviews it was scheduled for discussion at one of the weekly manuscript meetings where research editors and a statistician make final decisions on a number of papers.

A manuscript was submitted to disseminate a cross correlational survey research study. The manuscript states that the data were collected through surveys for the two calendar months prior to initial manuscript submission, which occurred in the middle of the third month. The initial submission indicated the research followed the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, but no other human subjects’ protection information was provided.

An author submitted a manuscript and stated that he was the sole author. The manuscript received a favourable peer review and eventually was accepted. Some time after the article was published, a co-author told the author to contact the journal to correct the author list. The author of record (AOR) did this and supplied co-author names to the journal.  

A paper was submitted to a journal. While the paper was being processed, the authors contacted the journal and advised that a predatory journal had published the same paper without their permission (the authors apparently submitted it in error, then withdrew it, but the journal proceeded with publishing).

A publisher co-published an editorial across its portfolio of six journals. Co-publication was clearly flagged in each journal.
 
Subsequently, there was a discussion on PubPeer on the editorials, with one comment suggesting that co-publication is the same as duplicate publication.