Peer review

Trust in peer review

September sees the sixth Peer Review Week taking place (21 - 25 September), which has now become something of an established fixture in the research community calendar. The theme for this year is ‘trust’; a focus which resonates strongly with the core values and goals of COPE, going hand in hand with ethical reliability and responsible leadership.

Possible breach of reviewer confidentiality

At this time we pay our respects to the memory of George Floyd, whose brutal killing has amplified issues of systemic racism in our society. We wish to voice our horror and outrage at the egregious violence, injustice, and marginalisation faced by people of colour in the US and throughout the world. We support all who stand against prejudice and discrimination of any kind.

Peer reviewers provide their own intellectual property to the important work of reporting research. Sometimes, though, their comments may not align with a journal’s style or requirements, or can stray into the realm of what some call “hostile reviews”. Also, sometimes reviewers miss the mark and either do not understand the paper or parts of it, or include content that is factually incorrect. What is an editor to do in their effort to balance the interests of the authors, reviewers, journals

Misconduct

Translation plagiarism is a type of disguised plagiarism which occurs when authorship credit is taken by someone who republishes the work of someone else, but in a different language. The difficulty of identifying this type of plagiarism is explored and the potential damage done by it, in the field of philosophy, examined.

https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12188