Module-5

 Best practices in research / standards setting initiatives and guidelines: COPE,

WAME, etc

Best Practices:- Research publishing depends, to a great extent, on trust. It occurs in an

environment of powerful intellectual, financial, and sometimes political interests that may
compete.

Good research and editing manage these interests and foster a sustainable and efficient
publishing system, which will benefit academic societies, publication houses, editors, authors,
research funders, readers, and publishers. Good publication practices do not develop by chance,
and will become established only if they are actively promoted.

COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATION ETHICS (COPE):- COPE (Committee on Publication

Ethics) is committed to educating and supporting editors, publishers and those involved in
publication ethics with the aim of moving the culture of publishing towards one where ethical
practices become a normal part of the publishing culture. The approach is firmly in the direction
of influencing through education, resources and support of our members, alongside the fostering
of professional debate in the wider community.

COPE has an objective to:

 Extend the range of our resources to meet the needs of all members, irrespective of
discipline, and develop new resources to meet the needs of universities and producers of
non-journal scholarly products.
 Be more responsive to ethical issues in scholarly work and its publication as and when
they arise.

DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS (DOAJ):- The DOAJ (Directory of Open

Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Currently, this
independent database contains over 16,500 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas
of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from
all countries and in all languages are included in the database.

The mission of the DOAJ is:

 To curate, maintain and develop a source of reliable information about open access
scholarly journals on the web;
 To enable scholars, libraries, universities, research funders and other stakeholders to
benefit from the information and services provided;

THE WORLD ASSOCIATION OF MEDICAL EDITORS (WAME):- Established in 1995,

WAME is a global non-profit voluntary association of editors of peer-reviewed medical journals
who seek to foster cooperation and communication among editors. WAME develops policies and
recommendations of best practices for medical journal editors and has a syllabus for editors that
members are encouraged to follow.

The objectives of WAME are as given:

 To facilitate worldwide cooperation and communication among editors of peer-reviewed

medical journals
 To improve editorial standards, to promote professionalism in medical editing through
education

OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PULBISHERS ASSOCIATION (OASPA):- OASPA is a

trade association that was established in 2008 in order to represent the interests of Open Access
(OA) publishers globally across all disciplines. By encouraging collaboration in developing
appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA publishing, OASPA aims to help
ensure a prosperous and sustainable future for the benefit of its members and the scholarly
communities they serve.

 Academic misconducts: Falsification, Fabrication and Plagiarism (FFP)

FABRICATION: - In scientific inquiry and academic research, data fabrication is the

intentional misrepresentation of research results. As with other forms of scientific misconduct, it
is the intent to deceive that marks fabrication as unethical, and thus different from scientists
deceiving themselves. There are many ways data can be fabricated. Experimental data can be
fabricated by reporting experiments that were never conducted, and accurate data can be
manipulated or misrepresented to suit a desired outcome.

Examples of this include the failure to account for measurement error.

FALSIFICATION: - Note that “Falsification” and “Fabrication” are not always easy to
distinguish. Fabrication is making up data, so reporting on experiments that never happened or
patients that never existed. Falsification is different in that an experiment might have taken place,
but that some measurements were altered. Here are some examples of research falsification;

 Removing an outlier from a series of measurements.

 Changing a measurement to make it look higher or lower.

PLAGIARISM: - Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or
without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All
published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is
covered under this definition. Plagiarism may be intentional or reckless, or unintentional.

 Redundant publications: duplicate and overlapping publications, salami slicing,

Selective reporting and misrepresentation of data.

Redundant Publication- A publication is called redundant when:

1) A published work (or substantial sections from a published work) is/are published more than
once (in the same or another language) without adequate acknowledgment of the source/cross-
referencing/justification, or,

2) When the same (or substantially overlapping) data is presented in more than one publication
without adequate cross-referencing/justification, particularly when this is done in such a way that
reviewers/readers are unlikely to realise that most or all the findings have been published before.

Duplicate publication includes the text in an article, but it also includes figures and data sets
previously published. If an author uses a figure in an article published in a blog, an abstract,
another journal article, a teaching file, or published lecture notes, that figure may have a
copyright associated with it or it at the very least it has been published. This figure could be a
graph or drawing produced by the author or a radiology image.

Salami Slicing- The ‘slicing’ of research that would form one meaningful paper into several
different papers is called ‘salami publication’ or ‘salami slicing’. Unlike duplicate publication,
which involves reporting the exact same data in two or more publications, salami slicing
involves breaking up or segmenting a large study into two or more publications. These segments
are referred to as ‘slices’ of a study.

As a general rule, as long as the ‘slices’ of a broken up study share the same hypotheses,
population, and methods, this is not acceptable practice. The same ‘slice’ should never be
published more than once.

The reason is that salami slicing can result in a distortion of the literature by leading
unsuspecting readers to believe that data presented in each salami slice (i.e., journal article) is
derived from a different subject sample.

Redundant publication and salami slicing: the significance of splitting data

When researchers are under pressure to constantly increase the number of publications to their
name, there is a temptation to split one set of results, or data set, into many articles.

Though alluring, this is generally considered unethical practice.

Whilst not such a serious problem as fraud or plagiarism, such over‐publishing wastes the time
of editors and reviewers (refereeing multiple articles, etc.), and may mislead the readers as well
as waste their time.

Producing many articles from a moderately sized research project might give it undue
significance – something which could initially appear beneficial to the research team responsible.

But splitting the data into segments may also affect the statistical significance of each part and
possibly undermine the findings themselves, thus changing an important result into several
moderately interesting results.
Such splitting of results to produce multiple papers is called redundant publication or salami
slicing, and is sometimes derisively described as the least publishable unit.

 Violation of publications ethics, authorship, and contributor ship

Authorship: - Naming authors on a scientific paper ensures that the appropriate individuals get
credit, and are accountable, for the research. While there is no universal definition of authorship,
an “author” is generally considered to be an individual who has made a significant intellectual
contribution to the study.

According to the guidelines for authorship established by the International Committee of

Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), "All persons designated as authors should qualify for
authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed."

Four criteria must all be met to be credited as an author:

 Substantial contribution to the study conception and design, data acquisition, analysis,
and interpretation.
 Drafting or revising the article for intellectual content.
 Approval of the final version.
 Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work related to the accuracy or
integrity of any part of the work.

Unacceptable Authorship

 "Ghost" authors, who contribute substantially but are not acknowledged (often paid by
commercial sponsors);
 "Guest" authors, who make no discernible contributions, but are listed to help increase
the chances of publication;
 "Gift" authors, whose contribution is based solely on a tenuous (weak and
unconvincing) affiliation with a study.
 Use of plagiarism software like Turnitin, Urkund and other open source software
tools

Uses of Plagiarism Tools

Plagiarism checker tools are an incredibly effective way of reviewing the essays or theses for any
case that can be a symbol of plagiarism.

A wide range of software are available to the researchers who take their academic work seriously
and want to make no mistake. These software application aims to:

 Verifying Originality
 Tracking Content Misuse
 In-Depth Plagiarism Analysis
Plagiarism Detection Tools

1) Turnitin:

 This is a successful Web based tool provided by iParadigms.

 Once a document is uploaded for plagiarism check, it creates a fingerprint of the
document and stores it.
 In this tool, detection and report generation is carried out remotely.
 It can be considered as one of the best plagiarism checkers for teachers.

2) Urkund:

 This is another Web based service which carry out plagiarism detection in server side.
 This is an integrated and automated solution for plagiarism detection.
 It is a paid service which uses standard email system for document submission and for
viewing results.
 This system claims to process 300 different types of document submissions and it
searches through all available online sources.

3) Grammarly Online Plagiarism Checker:

 Grammarly is a well-known tool among writers and also who need to quickly check if
article is original or copied from other places.
 If you are a professor and need to check if the research paper is original or copied from
multiple sources online, this tool is perfect for you.
 This is a multi-feature tool for webmasters to check the originality of the content, check
Grammar, Check the spelling of the article.
 It is highly recommend tool for plagiarism.

4) Unicheck:

 Unicheck is a paid versatile tool for checking the plagiarism.

 The interface is smooth and it checks the pages really fast.
 This is a perfect tool for corporates and professors who don’t mind paying a little for
higher accuracy.

Complaints and appeals examples and fraud from India and abroad