The author continues to say that they made a mistake—they thought that journal Y was a section within journal X (in reality the submission form clearly allows the author to pick a journal from a dropdown list and the submission acknowledgement email also contains the name of the journal, as does all subsequent communications). On submission, the author checked a box where he agreed on a possible transfer of the paper within the publisher family.
Although it seems that the authors’ behaviour was intentional, it is the authors’ prerogative to withdraw a paper at any point before it is published. While the Forum agreed that such behaviour is deplorable and a waste of editorial resources, the advice was to communicate this message clearly to the authors but not necessarily to directly punish them. This is especially applicable to more junior authors.
A suggestion was to write an editorial on this issue in general, explaining why it is not good practice.
An author submitted a redundant publication to one of our journals. After reviewing the report from the anti-plagiarism software, we followed the COPE flowchart up to and including contacting the author's institution. We have not received a response from the author or the author's institution. Shortly afterwards, the same author submitted a (different) redundant publication to one of our other journals. We followed the same steps and have not received a response.
本文没有进一步repercussio被拒绝ns for authors A. Authors A then resubmitted the manuscript to our journal a year later. We had since become more aware of pursuing cases of suspected plagiarism and asked for a statement before submission to peer review. Authors A answered in great detail, providing lots of information, apologizing profoundly and promised to take the utmost care that this would never happen again. We discussed this case and decided to proceed with peer review, treating this as a once only mistake and noticed that all of the criticized sections and more had been removed and/or rewritten.
论文A2随后由评审员R2评审，他发现了与第一篇不同的新的剽窃案例。同样，通讯作者A在被要求发表评论时，表示了极大的歉意。 We are unsure how to treat this, as the sections copied are not too extensive. However, given the author's history, we feel the need to issue a ban or possibly notify the institute? Does the Forum agree?
In view of the general interest in the case and further accusations of lax editing, and in order to preserve the reputation of the journals, the editors-in-chief decided to retract the papers, with the agreement of all authors, except for the author accused of misconduct, without waiting for the outcome of the external investigation. The society is continuing to review editorial procedures to heighten awareness of figure manipulation and duplication among reviewers and editors. The practice of banning authors will be reviewed.
The editor felt that there was a clear obligation on the part of A to acknowledge the earlier collaborative work with C, and that there was an equally clear obligation on the part of the journal to inform its readers that this acknowledgement was neglected in the A/B paper. A’s obligation resulted from (1) all the collaborative efforts between himself and C, (2) the fact that both A and C were listed as authors of the PowerPoint presentation and the various versions of the unpublished paper, and (3) the fact that A’s signature on the Statement of Authorship claiming originality of the entire work was not true.
The whole reviewing procedure was immediately halted. The editor-in-chief together with the Managing Editor sent an email to the original author with a request to confirm in writing the authorship of the revised version (this was done also because in the covering letter and in the revised version there were different sets of names). The author confirmed that the revised version was co-authored by two authors: he and reviewer A.
This situation led the editor-in-chief to assign the paper to reviewer C to determine if the manuscript is indeed worth publishing. The final recommendation of that review was that the manuscript should be rejected.
When the explanation was received from the reviewer, it differed from that of the authors and thus we decided to reject the manuscript and not to undertake any further action against either of the persons involved.