Thoughts on publishing ethics

Here's a piece on publishing ethics I did for Wiley's website on the subject. 

Where should one start a blog entry about publication ethics? It’s such a wide-ranging topic and, given that this isn’t supposed to be a book length entry, I will just pick on a couple of issues that I have seen occur over the years, either in one of the journals that I co-edit or that I have come across during conversations with fellow editors.

Over the years you begin to delude yourself into thinking that you have seen the full range of ethics infringements.  It’s particularly ironic, I guess, when you edit bioethics journals: you would hope that your authors would be clued in to publication ethics issues.   

We have seen quite a bit of plagiarism over the years. We do subject manuscripts toCrosscheck, both randomly as well as when we have reason to be suspicious of the provenance of some of the content claimed as original by an author. Now, given that we process hundreds of manuscripts each year, what does raise suspicion? Obvious stuff really: if an author whose first language isn’t English submits a manuscript that suffers fairly consistently from low quality English language expression, and suddenly there are a few pages of impeccable English, you would probably wonder how those impeccable bits came about. Sometimes there are perfectly innocent explanations, such as authors having had a friend copy-edit parts of their manuscript, but not all of it. On other occasions you discover that some material has indeed been plagiarized.  

You might also come across content that looks a little bit too familiar. Journal editors probably pick up on plagiarism for no other reason than that they send submitted papers out for review by true subject experts. More often than not they give you a heads-up on possibly plagiarized content. Funnily enough, this is how I came across a plagiarized paper for the first time in my academic life. The former editors of the journal that I now edit asked me to review a manuscript on a topic that I had just published a paper on. True enough, the paper they asked me to review was identical (to the title of the article) to my previously published piece. Go figure.

I don’t think, courtesy of legal restraints, we do a good job these days of dealing with obvious cases of plagiarism. We do a good job flagging a duplicate publication, as that is fairly easy to show. Plagiarism is becoming an endangered category. The reason, probably, is that to call something plagiarized content you’d need to prove intent if an accused author ever decided to sue you for libel. So, it seems to me that these days most instances of plagiarism are labeled as incidents of duplicate publication. The thing is, duplicate publication didn’t historically refer to duplicating other people’s content and pretending that it’s your own, but to duplicating your own content. The former would have been called plagiarism. The latter would have been called duplicate publication. Today both cases are most often referred to as duplicate publication due to fear of litigation.

Let me give you two examples, both from journals that I edit. We had large parts of an article we had published plagiarized in a medical journal. The author of the plagiarized content also happened to be a senior editorial board member of the medical journal that published said piece, and a senior bioethicist in the region. The medical journal’s editor investigated the matter and decided to publish an erratum regretting the inadvertent duplicate publication. And that was that. No professional sanction occurred, everyone happily pretended that the blatant verbatim copying of large parts of our original content was inadvertent. Nonsense. In addition, some academic institutions have been known to ignore information showing that their faculty were caught plagiarizing other people’s work.

The other example happened just a week or two ago. Academics submitted a paper to us that we accepted after peer review. They duly signed the standard disclosure form in which they assured us in writing that their content was original, and that it hadn’t been submitted or published elsewhere. We received a tip-off that the empirical component of the article we accepted (including a number of tables) had actually already been published in a local medical journal – and that indeed turned out to be the case. We emailed the authors of said document to ‘please explain’ and have yet to receive so much as an acknowledgment of receipt of our message. Either way, we caught this one. In many documents this kind of duplicate publication would be referred to as self-plagiarism. That’s a misnomer. You can’t plagiarize your own content; plagiarism by definition involves the theft of someone else’s intellectual property and it involves the thief pretending that it is his or her own. Clearly you cannot steal your own intellectual content, hence there is no such a thing as self-plagiarism.

I have great difficulty understanding why anyone would even try to publish plagiarized content. In this day and age, whole computer programs trawl academic publications non-stop, searching automatically for plagiarized content. Incidentally, one of the cases mentioned above came to my attention via this route. Why anyone would wish to subject themselves to the risk of getting caught is truly beyond me. Perhaps academics engaging in misconduct are banking on a lack ofenforceable regulations. Unless their employer punishes their misconduct, the worst that can happen to them is that a particular journal bans them from submitting (for a while). Perhaps publishers and groups such as COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) should come together and discuss whether more significant punitive measures could deter more authors from engaging in forms of academic misconduct.

The website Retraction Watch keeps track of many academic journal retractions. Check it out when you have a minute.  And COPE has developed a number of really useful flowcharts on what we as Editors should do if we come across cases of suspected plagiarism or duplicate publication. I recommend them to your attention. You might find them helpful whether you are an author or a journal editor.

News from BIOETHICS and DEVELOPING WORLD BIOETHICS

The journals
We got our annual report from our publisher a few days ago. Much of the stuff there is confidential, of course (and would likely bore you, too). However, there's bits and pieces of statistics that you might find interesting. In case you don't know the journals, or don't know them well, Bioethics is now in its 25th year of existence. It publishes 9 issues per calendar year. Developing World Bioethics is now in its 11th year of existence. It publishes 3 issues per calendar year. The journals come in a package, so what it boils down to is a monthly publication schedule. Bioethics is also the official publication of the International Association of Bioethics. This essentially entails us publishing every two years a special issue with the best contents form the IAB Congress, as well as us offering deeply discounted subscriptions to paid-up members of the IAB. We continue to sponsor events held during the IAB Congress every two years. Recently we have also provided sponsorship to a postgraduate bioethics conference held in the UK.

Our reach and academic success
We have been able to increase the reach of both journals quite significantly in 2010. The journals are available in about 3,500 university libraries by regular subscriptions. A further 6,000 libraries in developing countries have access to the journal at this point in time. I should like to add that this - to my mind - puts to rest claims about the unavailability of our academic content in the developing world due to high subscription fees. A further 5,200 libraries worldwide are able to access our content a year after it has been published.  So, in total, slightly less than 15,000 libraries across the globe provide access to our content.

This wide availability has also resulted in another significant boost to article downloads from our journals. In total about 250,000 articles from both journals were downloaded in 2010.

The European Science Foundation has given Bioethics the highest ranking available in the philosophy category.

Our upcoming content
Ruth Chadwick, Bioethics' other Editor, and I have lined up a whole range of interesting special issues over the next few years, covering topics all the way from synthetic organisms to ageing.  In case you're one of our readers, give us a shout with suggestions for special issue topics. We are always keen to hear from you!

Publication ethics
On the publication ethics fronts, we have introduced extensive regulations on authorship and conflict of interest matters that we hope will keep us out of the firing line on these issues for the foreseeable future.

Editorial board, bias and peer review
Last but not least, following our most recent review, invitations will be going out to a few academics to join our Editorial Board. Funny enough, that should also put to rest any suspicions that you might have with regard to editorial bias. Of the new members on the Editorial Board of the journal two are colleagues with whom I had quite serious professional conflict in the distant and in the very recent past, respectively. None of that made any difference to our decision to appoint to our Editorial Board. What matters crucially are competence and reliability. Reliability of reviewers is becoming sadly an ever bigger challenge. You would expect that academics who themselves publish academic contents in academic journals would be willing to review colleagues' academic content (the golden rule and all that jazz). The truth is though that that is becoming ever more difficult. All too often the most experienced peer reviewers decline and editors have to move lower down the list of experienced and knowledgable academics. The same authors, in other words, who would be all too keen to have their paper reviewed by a top academic like themselves are all too often not prepared to provide a similar courtesy in return when they are being asked to review academic content. This is quite disappointing, but equally, until university administrations and research funders give credit to academics for providing such services to the academic community, it is understandable that individual academics vote for working on their own paper rather than reviewing someone else's paper. All I can say is that some academics are paradigms of how a professional should act in this context and others are paradigms of the how-not-to. The former probably do not know how grateful we really are to them, as journal editors, for their services.

Self-Plagiarism - a misnomer if there ever was one

If you browse documents on academic misconduct you'll bump sooner or later into the term 'self-plagiarism'. Students in many universities are threatened with sanctions if they submit plagiarized as well as self-plagiarized content in seminar papers.

I take issue with this. There is no such thing as self-plagiarism. It's a misnomer. Plagiarism's defining feature is that it involves the theft of someone else's intellectual content and the attempt to pass off this intellectual content as one's own. So, I steal someone else's content and claim it is my own intellectual, creative contribution in a paper or some other medium.

What goes for self-plagiarism is nothing of that sort. I use my own content and recycle it in another paper I produce. This might involve using text blocks from an older paper in the new paper without referencing the text as such. Or it might involve the rewriting of text from an older paper in a new manuscript.


Now, because there is no theft of intellectual property involved, calling this plagiarism seems wrong to me. It also seems to me as if such behavior is not necessarily wrong. Let me give you a couple of examples. Say I invent a new method in genetics research and I re-use it time and again. Is it really wrong to copy-paste the description of my method in the method section of paper I produce? I doubt it. Equally, thinking about my own field. Say I got famous for having said something remarkable about the ethics of human enhancement. Obviously, I will be invited by textbook authors, journal editors, encyclopedia producers and whatnot to write my argument afresh for them. Is acceding to those requests really wrong? I doubt it. I might also be asked to reproduce my argument/analysis for a different audience (say a different language journal or a different audience comprised of readers of a specialist journal etc). Would it really be wrong to re-use content from an older paper I wrote without diligently referencing every single line of my own analysis? I doubt it. I also think that if you believe you have a really good idea, you'd aim to promote it, instead of burying it in one paper that might be missed by the community you hope to reach with your analysis.

Where what is called mistakenly self-plagiarism is wrong is:
1) when students are required to write an original piece for a seminar and it is made explicit by the teacher that they must not use content they produced earlier. The 'crime' here would lie in the violation of the rule though, and not in the renewed use of one's own intellectual material.
2) when the same argument is published in different journals with similar target audiences.  Doing this gives the mistaken impression that there's a deluge of interest in your particular analysis, while other content is prevented from getting published. Current guidelines tend to see this as a breach of etiquette rather than a capital crime (in publishing ethics terms).
3) more difficult is it when people re-use their content in multiple papers and then add it to their CVs. This is so, because these CVs are used to attract research funding (ie impress review committees), get promotions and stuff like that. I see this as more difficult, because more often than not, only bits and pieces of content are recycled. It's rarely the whole shebang published earlier. My view would be that the onus should be on the reviewers to ascertain the originality or lack thereof of papers listed on CVs. Alternatively, academics could be required to state per paper/book listed on their CVs to what extent the individual publications constitute original contributions. In any case, the violation here is not related to the integrity of the academic content but to do with other matters altogether.

My view would be that we should do away with the general term of 'self-plagiarism', because it is a misnomer, and that instead we should describe more carefully under what circumstances the recycling of one's own intellectual content is ethically problematic.  I hope to have shown that what is called today self-plagiarism is not at all always wrong, but that it can be wrong under certain circumstances.

I should stress what is true for everything posted on this blog, this is my personal view on this matter, no more, no less. 

Any comments?

Publicationethics.org on Ghostwriting

Publicationethics.org has a feature about several papers from the current issue of Bioethics on ghostwriting of medical journal articles.

Ghostauthors, ghost management and the manipulation of medical research

There are three articles in the June issue of Bioethics on different aspects of ghostwriting.

The first article, by Tobenna D Anekwe, “Profits and plagiarism: the case of medical ghostwriting” argues that “medical ghostwriting often involves plagiarism and, in those cases, can be treated as an act of research misconduct” and suggests measures to counter ghostwriting.

The second article, by Sergio Sismondo and Mathieu Doucet, “Publication ethics and the ghost management of medical publication" discusses the wider issue of management of the whole publication process, showing how “pharmaceutical companies engage in the ghost management of the scientific literature, by controlling or shaping several crucial steps in the research, writing, and publication of scientific articles."

The final article, by Carl Elliott and Amy Snow Landa, "What’s wrong with ghostwriting?" concludes that ghost authorship and ghost management are part of a much larger problem, “the manipulation of medical research for marketing purposes.”

Publishing ethically

I just came across this info in a book that I am reading (Irene Hames, Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals, Blackwell, Oxford 2007): In 2002 some 3000 or so scientists funded by US taxpayers through the US National Institutes of Health were interviewed (anonymously) about professional misconduct related to their scientific research. They were asked to report misbehavior during the preceding 3 years, and the only scientists interviewed were those in early or mid-career. One out of every three such scientists admitted some form of misbehavior 'in the top-10 most serious categories during the previous 3 years.' (pg 175) 6% of those interviewed failed to represent data that contradicted their hypothesis, 5% had published the same data already elsewhere (redundant publication), 10% assigned authorship inappropriately (eg to people who w ere not involved in the research), etc.

Based on my experience these problems start well at undergraduate level, because universities don't bother hard enough to try to stamp out academic misconduct. No dramatic surprise then that there's a substantial minority of scientists who think that such conduct is, if not acceptable, but certainly no big deal. What the data I have just reported also reveal is that folks usually get away with such conduct and that only a small minority get caught ... bad news all round.