I was on Friday at the Royal Society, speaking at the annual seminar for learned societies held by Wiley-Blackwell. There were a number of interesting presentations, not least that from Gavin Sharrock on publishing ethics. His theme was how ethics had risen to become a much more important issue for publishers than it had been only a few years ago, with increases in the number of cases of malpractice, and of retractions of journal articles.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is doing valuable work in this area, and most publishers now have established procedures for dealing with such problems. But I had not realised that retractions at Wiley-Blackwell are now running at more than one a week.
Publication ethics are a matter not just for publishers, of course, and they are at least mentioned in many of the codes of practice for research that are now proliferating (see for example the draft code recently issued by the UK Research Integrity Office). One of the points made in discussion by journal editors was that when problems of this kind arise, they can find themselves involved in many different sets of procedures, run by research funders or institutions, or in some parts of the world in formal legal proceedings. The relationships between these different sets of procedures can be highly complex, and also, of course, time cosuming. This is an issue that is going to have to be addressed if the number of cases conntinues to rise
by
sennoma
2009-06-22 05:25
scienceisasnakepit
simpy
Watch sennoma
