Why Has COPE Developed Guidelines for Cooperation Between Journals and Research Institutions?

The primary role of COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) is to provide advice and guidance to journal editors and publishers on ethical issues. COPE also expects its member journals to follow its Code of Conduct (1). The Code emphasizes that editors have a duty to pursue cases of suspected misconduct but makes it clear that such cases should be investigated by the researchers’ institutions, not by the journal. COPE therefore recognises the responsibility of research institutions (eg. universities and hospitals) to investigate cases of suspected research or publication misconduct such as data fabrication or plagiarism. COPE also emphasizes that journal editors should take responsibility for everything published in their journals, and recognises that this often requires liaison with institutions, especially in cases of suspected or alleged misconduct. Although journals should not generally attempt to investigate cases of suspected misconduct, editors are often the first people to become aware of possible problems. Suspicion of misconduct, or of honest errors, may surface during peer review or be raised by readers. When this happens, editors often need to refer the matter to the authors’ institution(s) and request an investigation or clarification. Similarly, if an institutional investigation reveals problems in published work, editors need to respond appropriately, for example by issuing a retraction or correction. Even when serious misconduct is not suspected, editors may seek clarification or arbitration from institutions, for example in cases of disputed authorship or if questions arise about the ethical review or conduct of research. Therefore, it is important that journals and institutions have effective channels of communication and the ability to cooperate. However, despite the importance of journals and institutions working together, COPE is aware that such cooperation does not always take place. COPE member journals can bring challenging cases to its quarterly Forum meetings to seek advice from other members. The anonymised cases are entered into a database which can be searched from the COPE website. Such cases cannot give an indication of the true frequency of problems, because editors probably bring only their most difficult cases to COPE. Nevertheless, an analysis of cases in which editors had tried to work with institutions showed a worrying number of problems, ranging from unclear communications to institutions not responding at all (2). Other sources also suggested that journals do not always respond appropriately when contacted by institutions (3). In the light of these findings, COPE therefore decided to develop guidelines on cooperation between journals and research institutions on research integrity cases (4). This document is based on COPE’s experience of the problems editors may face, and on wide consultation with institutions throughout the world and those responsible for research integrity and investigating cases of suspected misconduct. The key assumption underlying the guidelines is that, while journals should be responsible for the reliability of everything they publish, institutions should be responsible for the conduct of their researchers. In cases of proven serious misconduct, such as data fabrication or major plagiarism, journal and institutional policies are usually well aligned. For example, in such cases, the institution would normally require researchers to retract published articles and editors would also wish to do this to prevent readers from being misled by unreliable publications. However, the guidelines make an important point that editors’ responsibility to safeguard readers means that they may use definitions of misconduct (or inappropriate publication activities) that are stricter than those used by institutions. Problems can therefore arise if a journal asks an institution to investigate behaviours such as duplicate publication, which clearly EDiTORiAl Mat Soc Med. 2012 Sep; 24(3): 140-141