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Case

COPE Members bring specific (anonymised) publication ethics issues to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice. The advice from the COPE Forum meetings is specific to the particular case under consideration and may not necessarily be applicable to similar cases either past or future. The advice is given by the Forum participants (COPE Council and COPE Members from across all regions and disciplines).

COPE Members may submit a case for consideration.

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Showing 1–20 of 653 results
  • Case
    On-going

    Guest editors for single articles

    A COPE member has noted instances of journals contacting individuals - who are not on their editorial board - to request that they act as guest editor for a single manuscript. The invitation makes it clear that they are being asked to recruit reviewers and to make the editorial decision. This practice includes instances where the invitee has had no prior contact with the journal. C…
  • Case
    On-going

    Temporary exception to double anonymised review policy

    The journal conducts double-anonymous reviews of all manuscripts submitted. As part of the decision process, reviewers routinely receive a copy of the decision letter, which includes reviewers’ comments. In the transition to a new editorial staff, a change to the email template inadvertently meant that the full letter was sent out, including the corresponding author’s name. Before this was disc…
  • Case
    On-going

    Request to remove author from submitted manuscript due to academic misconduct

    Regarding a submitted (but not yet accepted) paper from a scientific collaboration, one of the authors has asked whether an instance of academic misconduct or - for that matter - any non-scientific but rather unsavoury personal facts or accusations (e.g. a penal or civil proceedings) can be considered as a valid ground for requesting that the journal remove an author from the paper, as per the…
  • Case
    On-going

    Reviewer misconduct and its potential impact on an submitted manuscript

    Author X raised concerns that confidential information obtained during the peer review of their submission with Journal Y had been misappropriated by one of the reviewers of their submission (reviewer Z). Author X believed that reviewer Z had used this confidential information in order to silently alter code published by reviewer Z with repository R, which contained errors that were high…
  • Case
    On-going

    Article published at two journals after withdrawal from first journal

    Journal B was contacted by a group of authors who had published their article in Journal B a few months previously. The authors were concerned as they found that their article had been published by Journal A, a journal they had previously submitted the article to but withdrawn prior to publication. Journal B requested the withdrawal confirmation from the authors, and this was duly provided. On…
  • Case
    On-going

    Data availability for vulnerable populations

    A paper on a vulnerable population was published in a journal. The journal followed their usual procedures for processing papers on vulnerable populations, by requesting and reviewing further information on the ethics approval and consent procedures of the study (e.g.: recruitment procedures; blank version of the consent document participants read and signed; the study protocol that was approve…
  • Case
    On-going

    Duplicate articles due to DOI reassignment

    The editors of Journal C have found that 15 of their recent articles have been assigned slightly different DOIs in the Online First and the final issue versions. This arose from administrative problems with the publisher’s production process and has resulted in duplicated articles in both spaces, and there may be other duplicate articles due to reassigning different DOIs. The editors of…
  • Case
    On-going

    Dealing with cases with culturally offensive content

    Society journal X and propriety journal Y have received complaints regarding historic papers published in their journals (generating a lot of anger on twitter). The papers outline a practise the society (who had a historic role in its development) no longer endorse. The society has released an apology about their involvement with the practise, but the practice itself is not illegal (in the majo…
  • Case
    On-going

    Author accused of sexual harassment

    A reviewer for Journal X declined to review a paper as author Y has been the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. Author Y left the institute before the result of the investigation, thereby avoiding the outcome of the case. There is an academic loophole which allows those accused of misconduct to avoid any potential consequences by resigning before the outcome of the investigation, mea…
  • Case
    On-going

    Unauthorised reviewer challenges

    A paper submitted to a journal with a single anonymous peer review policy was assigned to a prospective reviewer, who agreed to undertake the review. The reviewer then sent an email addressed to a number of different research group and institutional mailing lists calling for volunteers to review the paper. The reviewer attached the PDF of the paper, which had been downloaded from the submission…
  • Case
    On-going

    Where should journals escalate serious concerns about an institution or institutional review board?

    A publisher received a submission to one of their journals that raised ethical concerns. The concerns were related to potential harm or undue risk for participants who may be vulnerable. The publisher reviewed the ethics approval statement, and the authors had met the journal’s policy requirements by prospectively obtaining ethics approval from their institution before beginning the rese…
  • Case
    On-going

    Managing an editor’s undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article

    An opinion piece on a polarising political and technological topic was published. A discussion ensued on social media, and shortly after, the publisher received a formal complaint stating that the editor-in-chief of the journal, who had managed the peer review process for the manuscript, had a conflict of interest and should not have made the final acceptance decision. When the publishing team…
  • Case
    On-going

    Data integrity issues

    Several years ago, a third party contacted the journal with concerns about data irregularities in two randomised controlled trials published about 10 years ago. Both of the papers were published before the journal had strict requirements on data upload to a public repository and availability. The journal sent an initial email to the corresponding author of both papers (the same author fo…
  • Case
    On-going

    Academic freedom

    A final year student, and two other researchers in law, all from the same university, undertook research into a recent court judgment on the rules in relation to civil servants making public comments. Based on this research, a manuscript was drafted to be submitted to a double anonymised peer reviewed journal. The manuscript is highly critical of the judgment’s reasoning and impact. All three a…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Possible peer review manipulation

    A journal received a complaint by one of the co-authors of an article submitted by a research team, stating that one of the reviewers suggested by the corresponding author sent an email to corresponding author asking them to tell them what comments they should insert in their review. In response, the corresponding author asked the co-authors to propose comments to be sent to the reviewer. One o…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Is there a time limit for submitting a critique of a published article?

    A letter to the editor was submitted to a journal with a comment referring to a study published a year previously. The reader raised concerns about the study and interpretation of the results. The editors of the journal examined the peer review comments of the manuscript and found that the aspects in question were missed out. The journal sought expert advice from an independent reviewer who com…
  • Case
    On-going

    Removing a retracted article from a third party site

    Journal A published a case report. Following publication, the publisher of journal A was contacted by a representative of the individual depicted in the article stating that, contrary to what the authors stated in the article, consent was not given for the publication. The article was retracted and removed to protect the identity of the individual and all indexing sites were updated. The origin…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Suspicious responses to authorship change requests

    A journal received a request for multiple changes to the authorship list after the manuscript was accepted. Originally, there were five co-authors. After acceptance, the journal received the following requests from author A, the corresponding author and co-first author: remove one of the co-authors (author D), add a new co-author (author E), reorder the list of authors, and change the designate…
  • Case
    On-going

    Change of corresponding author after manuscript published online

    On submission of a manuscript to a journal, one of the authors was indicated as the corresponding author. During the submission, review, and revision process, and also through copyediting and proofreading, the corresponding author responded to all emails, signed the publishing agreements, and was generally available. At this time, the authors of the manuscript did not mention a possible change…
  • Case
    On-going

    Authorship dispute involving a commercial institution

    A paper was published in a journal. After publication, an associate editor of the journal said that they and other colleagues should have been authors on the paper. They cited a patent they helped write that overlapped with the article as proof that they should be authors on the paper. The authors of the paper refuse to add the associate editor and colleagues as authors.   Unfortuna…

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