Misconduct/questionable behaviour (author)

The Forum agreed that the journal behaved appropriately and handled the case correctly.

In terms of what the journal could do for future situations, the COPE Audit stresses the need for an appeals process, and that the process is clearly described in the author guidelines or on the journal's website. The journal might wish to look again at their instructions to authors and include a statement about the editorial decision making process in the appeals process, stating that the associate editors make recommendations to the editor, if appropriate, and that the final decision rests with the editor. The journal might also wish to add prominently to the author guidelines that the deliberations and decisions are, in general, confidential, and that any specific enquiries would have to requested formally by a lawyer. 

The Forum suggested that in retrospect, perhaps the journal should have involved the other co-authors, given that it was the corresponding author who made the threats. It is possible the co-authors may not have been aware of the corresponding author’s threats. 

Also, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible that after the author had done the social media poll, and was asking for more detail, it might have been possible to de-escalate the situation by giving more detail on why the appeal was declined.

Another suggested approach was to look at this from the point of view of a difficult personality with misdirected enthusiasm, someone who does not understand the process well, but is engaged and enthusiastic, who might respond to direction and education from the journal.

The Forum noted that editors have no control over whether authors withdraw a paper even if significant work towards publication has already been done. The Forum questioned why the authors did not receive notification that their paper had been accepted before copyediting began. Were all the authors notified of this decision? Did they assign copyright, or did they agree to publication?

The Forum recommended that journal processes should be in place to preclude these situations. The editor should re-evaluate the journal’s internal editorial processes. Is there a possibility that the authors discovered a critical error and decided they could not publish the paper? The editor could consider communicating with the authors to determine if something in their process caused them to withdraw their paper. The editor would not want to publish an article if the author wants to withdraw it.

The editor has no choice but to accept the author’s decision. The Forum recommended that the journal should review their internal processes to make sure expectations are clear in their communications with authors and revise where needed. COPE’s journal auditing tool (https://publicationethics.org/news/new-cope-audit) might be helpful to the editor in that process.

The Forum would advise contacting the author one more time, and specifically stating that if no response is received within a given time frame, then the editor will contact the author’s institution and ask them to investigate. The editor should be very clear about the date by which a response is expected. That may provide the motivation for the author to respond.

The Forum asked what is the percentage similarity that should raise concerns? This varies widely—by discipline, even by editors within the same discipline. The similarity index needs to be reviewed carefully, and experienced editors will look at all aspects of the article and the sources when deciding if there is significant overlap. Is there a minimum cut-off score below which there is no need to check for plagiarism? One study found a cut-off value of 15% to be useful (https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s410...).

If the editor believes that there was no malicious intent on the part of the authors, an educational approach may be appropriate—for example, if the authors are junior researchers. The editors could explain what is expected of authors in terms of attribution of text, and best practice in this area. However, the editor may not be in a position to know the intent of the authors and this would be better addressed by the institution.

The journal cannot proceed moving this article forward until some of these questions are answered. COPE would never advise banning authors because of the legal implications.