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Welcome to the September issue of COPE Digest.
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.
COPE’s commitment to Peer Review Week is an interactive, virtual workshop with break out groups to discuss real cases raised by COPE members to identify issues in peer review and how to handle them. This is a new format for COPE and the response has been so successful that we currently have a full registration and a wait list. Given the popularity of the workshop, we plan to extend this format to other discussion topics of interest to our membership.
Chief among the initiatives and resources COPE has developed to enhance trust in the peer review and publishing process are the Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, which are available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, to broaden their global use. The introduction to these guidelines opens with the statement ‘The peer review process depends to a large extent on the trust and willing participation of the scholarly community and requires that everyone involved behaves responsibly and ethically.'
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We look to further promote trust in reviewing and publishing by asking communities what support they need from us and responding in a collaborative manner. .....
READ MORE >
COPE Chair Deborah Poff
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POSSIBLE BREACH OF REVIEWER CONFIDENTIALITY
The editor of a journal that had recently rejected a manuscript was informed by the author that an attendee at a national conference had asked some questions about that paper. The author suspected that the attendee had been given a copy of the manuscript by a peer reviewer, because the journal used open-identity (non-anonymous) reviewing and the person was not one of the named reviewers.
When the editor asked the two relevant reviewers if they had forwarded the manuscript to anyone, both replied that they had not and had maintained confidentiality. The editor relayed this to the author, noting that the paper had previously been rejected by two other journals and was currently being reviewed by a fourth journal. Accordingly, the author was advised to also consider contacting the editors of those three journals.
Question(s) for the COPE Forum
- Do you think that the journal handled this correctly?
In this case discussion Trevor Lane, COPE Council Member, shares the advice given by fellow COPE members and adds to the discussion with further analysis of this and similar issues.
READ MORE >
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Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers
Peer reviewers play a crucial role in ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. Learn from the experience and guidance of other peer reviewers, editors and researchers, in these COPE guidelines, to help develop your own policies and practices. Available in English, Chinese and Spanish.
READ GUIDELINES >
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LATEST PUBLICATION ETHICS NEWS
This month the news includes articles on peer review, authorship, COVID and more.
- The author encourages training on how to review manuscripts constructively to promote and foster the power of compassion in peer review and away from personal attacks.
- Europe PMC is now indexing full-text preprints related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the underlying data, in a format that allows data mining.
- Guidelines on how institutions assess and reward their researchers’ work, the ‘Hong Kong principles’ have been designed to strengthen research integrity.
READ MORE >
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DECEMBER FORUM
COPE Members: if you have a publication ethics issue you're currently dealing with and need advice from other COPE members, you can submit your case for discussion and advice at the next forum, Tuesday 8 December 2020, 2-3.30pm (GMT).
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Visit our events page to read more about upcoming events which include discussions on publication ethics issues.
- Peer review week, #TrustInPeerReview 21-25 September 2020
- Medical Editors Short Course, 11-13 November 2020
EVENTS >
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COPE Members
MEMBERSHIP HANDBOOK
The new membership handbook is a guide, for new and existing members of COPE, to the benefits of being a COPE member, how to make the most of membership, and how to uphold the highest ethical standards in research publishing.
READ HANDBOOK >
UPDATE YOUR MEMBER DETAILS
Have your contact details changed? Do you have new staff at your journal?
Update the contact details for your journal on our website and ensure you and your colleagues can access all COPE resources.
UPDATE YOUR DETAILS >
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COPE Digest Editor:
Nancy C Chescheir, MD, Editor-in-Chief, Obstetrics and Gynecology
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