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Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, p. 1687
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5768.1687c
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You're a journal editor looking at a paper whose authors have drug company ties. Or you suspect the paper has already been published in Norwegian. How do you make sure it's on the level? Many journals may be at a loss, a new survey finds, because they lack policies to deal with such situations.

The U.K.-based Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) surveyed its 346 member biomedical journals. About one-third responded. "So many journals had weak or nonexistent policies" for authors, says COPE chair Harvey Marcovitch, a pediatrician. Some 13% lack a procedure for handling conflict of interest, and 28% have no system to ensure that a paper has gone through an ethics approval. Feedback mechanisms are also weak: 60% had no complaint procedure for authors, and 9% did not publish letters to the editor, which COPE considers an important postpublication peer-review mechanism. And 64% of journals have no policy for dealing with a potential case of research misconduct. Even when journals tried to get to the bottom of an allegation, one in five cases ended in a stalemate. (See the report at http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/reports/2005.)




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)