2023

The journal received multiple complaints from two ‘whistleblowers’ in country A regarding the methodology presented in an article published in 2021. The Editors began an investigation into the paper, using evidence provided by the whistleblowers. The Editors felt that based on the provided evidence, an investigation should be carried out.

We launched a Special Issue (SI) focusing on the application of a particular clinical protocol, with guest editors that have an extensive clinical history in applying this protocol. This specific protocol is currently used and promoted by a small subset of practitioners, with limited wider recognition. The SI concluded with a substantial number of published articles, including several case reports.

A journal has been contacted by a group of authors from Ukraine who wish to retract their article because of acute ethical issues in relation to the war with Russia. The authors are employees of a research institute in Ukraine. When preparing their article they were not fully informed about the country of the organisers of the conference. They are concerned that participation in a Russian conference may bring dismissal from their posts, and also potentially imprisonment. 

A whistleblower posted on PubPeer regarding some apparently overlapping images in an article published several years earlier. To the research integrity team there appeared similarities, enough to warrant a request for the original images / raw data from the authors. The authors said they no longer had access to the original data and have denied any editing was made to the images.

We are handling a manuscript that is now ready for acceptance. During the review process we noticed that one coauthor had the surname "999" and this coauthor and two others had the affiliation "Independent researcher". We asked the corresponding author what this meant. Their answer was that the names of two of these three authors, including "999", were pseudonyms.

As an editor of a journal with a double-anonymous peer review system, I often wonder about the right balance between open science practices and anonymisation of the manuscript for the review process. How much anonymisation is enough while being compatible with open science dissemination?

A journal recently received an 11 page letter via email titled ‘request for a retraction’ from a pharmaceutical company (PC). They have issues with one of our critically appraised topic(s) which critically appraises two papers that were funded by PC and written by employees at PC. The two papers were published in separate journals. 

We received four letters of accusation on the same published article from 4 different email addresses (namely A, B, C, D) consecutively with the interval of each being 1 month. 

A paper that has been accepted for publication in a journal has recently been found to be unsuitable for publication. The authors have been highlighted in other journals for disseminating misinformation regarding the treatment of COVID-19. An expression of concern has been issued on another article, similar to the one we are close to publishing, in another publisher's journal. We looked into the paper in our system further and have decided the peer review comments are insufficient.

We recently received a complaint about an article which was published in our journal, which was originally sent to Journal X and copied to us. The complainant claimed that they had submitted an article to Journal X which was rejected. They alleged that their ideas and data had been leaked, stolen by another group of researchers, and published in our journal.