Welcome to the December issue of COPE Digest.

Welcome to our final Digest of 2020, that has affected us all in many different ways. In my April letter, I addressed the COVID-19 situation as we faced it at the time, and during this year we have seen how people and organisations have adapted. In this letter, I will take a look back over the year and see what implications COVID-19 has had for the COPE community and publication ethics.

Speed of review has raised questions over the rigour of peer review being conducted on the many papers being fast tracked. An article in Nature Human Behaviour in June analysed PubMed data and found an average of 367 COVID-19 articles published per week, with a median time from submission to acceptance of just 6 days.

To support this high speed process, a cross publisher initiative, endorsed by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), was launched to provide a single overarching reviewer pool and portable peer review system, across journals and platforms, including Hindawi, eLife, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, and many more.

To further adapt to this increased speed, maintain quality, and offer recognition and support during the year, a wealth of materials were published. A Wiley article highlighted four interventions to help with finding reviewers and not overworking them; a statement on quality standards from EASE and a Neurología article calling for consideration for the role of Editors during the pandemic, among many other initiatives.

In May, arXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv, and other preprint platforms adjusted their policies to not accept computational models so that the chances of misinformation or unhelpful information being posted would be reduced; just one aspect that brought discussions on preprints to the forefront. In September, The Lancet changed their editorial processes to address the surgisphere controversy, adding stages to their peer review process to incorporate more systematic dataset reviews to increase the reliability of the data.

Top cases in 2020

• request to change the order of authors;
• a post-publication request for a reviewer to be added as an author after publication;
• changing an author's name after publication. Recently, the publishing and academic communities have been working to develop new guidance to ensure that authors who are transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse can easily update their names on articles. COPE will be issuing guidance on this in due course.

• Withdrawal of a paper at proof stage with additional COPE case examples, including: unethical withdrawal after acceptance to maximise the impact factor; increased number of casual submissions; dual submission and editor's failure to take action
• Self-plagiarism and suspected salami publishing, a popular topic for discussion, including six similar cases around salami slicing, copied text passages and prior publication.
• Editing of peer review comments with discussion on reviewers who write comments they don't want the author to see, and transparency of peer review.

Latest publication ethics news

• Young scientists in Malaysia have made research integrity training fun and relevant.
• A survey of ecologists asked whether original authors who shared their data should be included as co-authors, if others use that data.
• A study of the phenomenon of journals that disappeared between 2000-2019.

Peer review cases: Spanish translations 

• Caso 1 El editor y los revisores solicitan que se cite su trabajo
• Caso 2 Proceso de revisión por pares comprometido en artículos publicados
• Caso 3 El autor solicita que ciertos expertos no participen en el proceso editorial
• Caso 4 El autor de un artículo rechazado nombra y critica de forma pública al revisor por pares

• Should COPE use its criteria for membership as an instrument to evaluate standards of scholarly publishing vehicles for the purpose of informing authors, peer reviewers, readers, scholars invited to serve on editorial boards, and universities evaluating scholarly productivity?
• Should COPE and/or other industry organisations form a global compact of signatories to commit to the practice of research and publication integrity and further to the active marginalisation of predatory publishing within the scholarly communities of universities, editors, and publishers?
• Should COPE and/or other industry organisations act as a third party retraction service for authors who have unknowingly published with a predatory publisher which will neither withdraw nor retract the articles at the request of the authors? 

• A holistic view of the scientific communications environment, 26-27 January 2021
• Short course on publication ethics with Council of Science Editors, 29 January 2021

COPE Digest Editor: