PUBLICATION ETHICS AND PEER REVIEW

Abstract

There were over 200 public retractions of published articles from Taylor & Francis journals alone in the last year, and ethical misconduct in academic publishing more broadly features regularly in the press. While academic publishing can present a labyrinth of competing requirements, it is important to recognise that they all live under the umbrella of research integrity and involve potential reputational risks, as well as more serious harms. This chapter explores some key ethical issues that journal publishing involves, which go well beyond the ethical review board processes that many require. These issues include plagiarism, duplicate publication, peer review conflicts of interest, falsification and misrepresentation of data, authorship, conflicts of interest with participants, relationship with funders, whistle blowers, and public feedback on published papers. This chapter will briefly examine these practices and related case studies, academic debate about them, and importantly, how global awareness is very mixed on ethical issues—with many institutions having poor practices in place. This then feeds back to the publisher and journal and can have the effect of increasing the instances of rejection. In each case, the chapter will give some guidance on how these issues can be addressed in a positive manner.