Write for Editor ResourcesWe host articles on a range of topics, including:

n Journal management best practice n Peer review n Raising the profile of your journal n Citations and impact n Publishing ethics n Open access (OA) n Technological advances

1. Be aware of common ethical issues you’re likely to face as an editor. Editor Resources publishes guidance and advice on dealing with these.

2. Contact your Taylor & Francis Managing Editor. They will help support you as you investigate a case and can provide useful email templates and guidance documents.

3. Technology helps – request a CrossCheck report if you have any concerns about the originality of a paper.

4. Keep cases confidential. Don’t copy in additional people who don’t need to be involved. This means that no information is circulated before the facts have been established.

5. Take advantage of peer-review system features such as manuscript flags to identify manuscripts that have been placed on hold while any concerns raised are investigated.

Top 5 tips for handling ethical concerns As a journal editor, how can you ensure good ethical conduct on your journal?

editorresources.taylorandfrancisgroup.com@TandFEditors

Technology helps: introducing CrossCheck Find out how CrossCheck could help you prevent plagiarism on your journal.

What is CrossCheck? The CrossCheck service is available to publishers who are members of CrossRef, a not-for-profit organization for scholarly publishing that works on tools to improve research communication. It is designed to help publishers, journal editors and staff actively engage in efforts to prevent plagiarism.

How does it work? When a CrossRef member publisher starts to participate in the CrossCheck service, they allow the full text of their journals to be indexed in the CrossCheck database so that they and other publishers can check against them.

How can I use CrossCheck? Where there is a question about the originality of an article, you can contact your Managing Editor to request a CrossCheck report for the paper. This report will flag any text matches to papers held in the CrossCheck database.

http://bit.ly/gettingtogripswithcrosscheck

To find out more

visit:

Publishing ethics and your journal

editorresources.taylorandfrancisgroup.com@TandFEditors

The importance of training in peer review By Professor Jacqueline Stevenson, Head of Research, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University

Be part of it…Some of our recent contributors

Paul Naish, Publisher

Graham Walton, Editor, New Review of Academic Librarianship

Matthew Johnson, Editor, Global Discourse

Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric

Elizabeth Allen, Ph.D. student, King’s College, London

Ellie Gilroy, Managing Editor

Lisa Adkins, Co-Editor, Australian Feminist Studies

Do you have something to say on one or all of these issues? Email

jnls_editorresources@tandf.co.uk for guidelines and more information – we’d love to hear from you. Posts can

be funny, inspirational, or instructional.

http://bit.ly/handlingpublishingethicstips

Read the rest

at:

Dear Editors,Publishing ethics and ethics misconduct are topics that journal editors certainly hear a lot about now, whether through direct experience in dealing with suspected misconduct on their journals, or through reading about cases and concerns in the media. At their core, publishing ethics are guidelines that should be followed by authors, editors, and reviewers to maintain the integrity of the peer-review and publication process.

In this issue in our series of topical newsletters, we’re focusing on publishing ethics and your journal.

Find out what the common ethical issues are, learn how CrossCheck can help with combating plagiarism, and find out how your publisher can support you in safeguarding the journals you work on.

Visit Taylor & Francis Editor Resources for more information about the topics discussed here, and for further news and ideas from the journal publishing front line.

Best wishes,

Leila and Claire, on behalf of the Editor Resources team

I have been peer-reviewing academic papers for journals for more than a decade. I imagine I have now reviewed well over a hundred papers and because of this I have played a role in shaping what journals publish and, by default, what gets read, and so what gets known. It is, therefore, perhaps astonishing (to those outside of the system), but unsurprising (to those inside it), that until a few months ago I had never received any training on how to perform this highly regarded but (mostly) wholly unpaid role.

In my current role as Head of Research in the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, I have been involved in a range of writer development initiatives. Those who have attended these sessions have also commented on the difficulties of giving and receiving peer-reviewer feedback, with some colleagues indicating that they have found the whole process stressful, troublesome, or problematic. Therefore the offer by Taylor & Francis to deliver a peer-review session as part of our writer development activities was warmly welcomed: newer reviewers wanted to find out more about the whole process whilst more experienced researchers (including myself) wanted to get a sense of whether we had actually been getting it right.

The comprehensive session with Taylor & Francis covered both sides of the peer-review process (both giving and receiving) and included the publishing cycle, decoding peer-review language, standards of etiquette, reasons for rejection/acceptance, models of reviewing, and help for prospective authors. It was an extremely illuminating session and the attendees found it remarkably useful – either because it enabled academics to understand the whole review process, or because it helped us to recognize where we were getting it right (or not).

If we are to act as the sort of gatekeepers to knowledge that I have described above we should do so with integrity. A comprehensive understanding of the peer-review process can only help to maintain and sustain this level of integrity.

Read in full at:

http://bit.ly/traininginpeerreview

Common ethical issues explained As an editor, you will almost certainly need to handle a publishing ethics case at some point during your time working on the journal. The following are some common ethical issues to be aware of:

Dual submission: publishing substantially the same results in different journals, sometimes described as “redundant or duplicate publication.”

Plagiarism: presenting the work of others as your own without proper acknowledgment.

Self-plagiarism: the verbatim or near-verbatim reuse of significant portions of your own work without citing the original source.

Conflicts of interest: a situation in which an author has potential competing interests, be it professional or financial, in the submission and publication of their paper and its research to the extent that it might skew or corrupt their manuscript, or the results of their research.

Data falsification: the U.S. Office of Research Integrity defines research falsification as “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.”

Data fabrication: the “making up” of entire sets of data or results and recording or reporting them as genuine findings.

http://bit.ly/peerreviewintegrity

To find out more

visit:

Our recent white paper, “Peer review in 2015: a global view” surveyed over 7,400 researchers globally, alongside checking for global agreement and disagreement via a series of focus groups in the U.K., China, and South Africa. We asked researchers from across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and medicine, who had experience of publishing in a number of peer-reviewed journals (with Taylor & Francis and other publishers), to tell us about their perception of the prevalence of ethical issues in peer review.

In both the humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology and medicine (STM), survey respondents rated seniority and regional bias as most common, and (unsurprisingly) suggested that double-blind peer review was most capable of preventing reviewer discrimination based on an author’s identity.

Double-blind peer review was also rated the most effective in stopping overly positive reviews, though views in HSS and STM diverged on which peer-review model was most effective at stopping reviewers delaying the publication of competitor research. In HSS, double-blind review was top-rated in this area, whilst in STM it was open review (though by a very small margin).

Gender bias and the use of false identities were rated as the two least prevalent ethical issues, although this comment, anonymously reported, highlights that this can, and does, happen:

What are “fake reviewers”? When authors suggest seemingly legitimate academic reviewers, but the addresses that accompany the suggestions are not controlled by the person named; instead the webmail address is controlled either by a biased close associate of the author, or the author of the manuscript, posing as a qualified reviewer.

As a responsible publisher, we have been looking at ways to tackle this issue, and one of the steps we are taking to safeguard the integrity of our peer review is to remove the “Preferred reviewers” function from our ScholarOne Manuscripts and Editorial Manager sites. We made the decision to remove this feature from our manuscript-tracking systems to help safeguard our peer-review process, and ensure it remains objective, responsible, and fair.

“I used to be at a university which is low ranking in my current

field. When I was there I couldn’t get a paper accepted but now I am at a well-

respected institution, I feel some papers are accepted too easily!”

Researcher, Environmental Science, UK

Read in full at:

http://bit.ly/ethicsinpeerreview

Visit:

http://bit.ly/ethicalissuesor contact your Taylor & Francis Managing Editor for more information and guidance on these issues.

Read in full:

http://bit.ly/copeandpublicationethics

Publishing ethics: the view from COPE What’s next for the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE)? We spoke to Virginia Barbour, COPE Chair, to find out.

What we see at COPE is that publication ethics is part of research ethics more widely and there are no “pure” publication ethics issues, even plagiarism, duplicate submissions, authorship issues, or reviewer misconduct. Every one of these issues arises because, ultimately, it is worth someone trying to game the system. With the pressure to publish, and especially the pressure to publish in specific journals, academics can be sorely tempted to cut corners.

We see a need for a better understanding of issues in publication ethics and how they relate to academic incentives as being crucial. At the same time we will continue to do what our members need, which is to provide practical resources to educate and support them, such as our flowcharts and discussion documents and our in-person meetings.

“Some of the reviewers don’t exist. The author forges

a name, creates an identity, applies for a new mailbox and reviews their

paper themselves. They submit their paper the first day and get their comments the next day.”

Researcher, Healthcare, China

Ethics in peer review – the reality for researchers