Abstract

For better or worse, academic publishing remains the most common method used by scientists to communicate the findings of their research – with most promotion structures currently and inexorably tied to maximising scholarly impact measures like the number of publications in high ‘impact’ outlets and their citation rates. As a consequence of these incentives, we note increasing accounts of abuse and subversion of the academic publishing system by authors (e.g. rigging peer review, salami slicing), reviewers (e.g. coercing citations, appropriating and suppressing competitors’ research) and editors (e.g. excessive self-publication, nepotism/cronyism, altering the work of others without permission). For this symposium, we will focus on the latter of these three issues – editorial misconduct. An issue that is regarded by modern peer review scholarship as both one of the highest research priorities, as well as the one of the most challenging topics to investigate. The proposed event will outline some case examples of editorial misconduct, as well as data on how journal editors across ecology, economics, psychology, physics and medicine view these practices. We will also outline what mechanisms are currently in place to police misbehaviour, and present the former chair of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) views on how effectively they are being used to address editorial misconduct. We hope that the symposium will provide useful information for all attendees on the topic, as well as stimulate discussion about the issue and how effectively it is being addressed by the scientific community.