Post-publication discussions and corrections

A researcher has published a paper in our journal using a scale published in 2008. She wrote to the scale developer in 2014/2015 at least three times (emails are on file) before the start of the project, but the scale developer did not respond despite repeated email reminders. No indication of the need for a license was received. In 2017, when the researcher published the paper using the above scale, she was contacted by a person claiming that he was representing the scale's developer and asked for a retrospective license and license fee, and threatened that if the she did not apply for a retrospective license and pay the license fee, she may need to take legal responsibility and retract the published paper. He also said that if she does not pay the fee, then the team’s lawyer would contact her. The name of the lawyer is given, with a gmail account. No firm name or any other information is provided. The researcher has searched the internet and found examples of this person asking other people to apply for a retrospective license and receiving money.

最终收到了电子秤开发人员的电子邮件，要求研究人员遵守他的“首席研究员”的要求。考虑到这可能是个骗局，这个案子被提交给了规模开发者所在的学院院长。院长的回答是：“得知发生了什么事，我很难过。我们的机构不持有此许可证，也不支持scale developer正在采取的行动“”。该量表于2008年公布，其发展由公共资金资助。该量表是在1986年出版的原始量表的基础上修改而成的，其发展也是由政府资助的。这两个量表属于公共领域。

许多人已经支付了一笔费用，往往是可变的，往往在数千美元。一些机构决定收回这篇文章。该团队正在使用欺凌和攻击性策略来说服研究人员支付费用（他们还没有告诉相关研究人员费用是多少，但通过互联网博客，这似乎是一个非常可变的数额）。他们还向该研究员所在的大学校长、副校长和负责研究的副校长以及我们发表论文的期刊发送了电子邮件。他们每天发送3-4封恐吓邮件（尽管这似乎在几周后就停止了）。

Question(s) for the COPE Forum

·作为一名编辑我该怎么做？我是否要求作者出示许可证，否则我们将需要收回文章？作者曾三次申请使用公开的电子秤，但没有得到电子秤开发商的回应。

·由于该量表是公开的，是否足以让某人在适当的确认/参考下使用？出版物中没有提到这是一份许可材料。