2021

The journal received a submission which proceeded through peer review and was recommended for publication. The authors responded to the revision letter, providing a detailed itemised list of changes and revised their manuscript accordingly. The revised manuscript was subsequently accepted for publication. 

A paper was published in a journal. After publication, the author contacted the journal to ask for withdrawal of the paper because of some mistakes. After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, the paper was found to be incomplete due to the dependent variable used in the analysis and the literature review used.

A complainant raised six articles to the attention of the editor-in-chief, with concerns about ethical approval and possible conflicts of interest regarding the way that approval was granted. The studies all involved minority populations. 

A preprint server owned by a commercial publishing company posted a paper and assigned a DOI to the preprint. The manuscript was then submitted to peer reviewed journal X, owned by a different publisher. Assuming acceptance at the journal, can the article be published under a different DOI belonging to journal X?

In 2020, the corresponding author of an article published online three years previously notified the journal of an authorship conflict and explained that the institution was requesting retraction. Because authorship conflict does not typically warrant retraction, the publisher requested further details from the author and the author's institution about the conflict.

A newly relaunched open access, peer reviewed journal operates a double blind peer-review system. At all stages of the review, until the decision to accept has been taken, neither the author nor the reviewer can identify the other. The journal always uses at least two reviewers, who are also unaware of the identity of each other.

Author group A deposited a preprint onto a preprint server and simultaneously submitted the manuscript to journal A. Peer review in journal A took some considerable time, but the paper (paper A) was eventually published. During the long peer review of paper A, author group A noticed that another set of authors, author group B, had published paper B in journal B.

Journal A received a paper on a cross sectional study from six coauthors. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Two months later, a clinician contacted the journal and said that the material was taken from their thesis submitted to the same institution six years previously. 
 

An article with four authors was published in journal A. The same article with a slight change in the title and one additional author, was published three months later in journal B. The authors had submitted the article to both journals at the same time.