The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) North American Seminar was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, this August with a record breaking attendance from across the region of 81 delegates. The focus of the seminar was new technologies and behaviours for identifying publication ethics issues and those present were fortunate to be involved in an engaging and informative program covering a wide breadth of topics including persistent identifiers in the authoring process, linked content, open access and copyright, and a panel discussion on the use of plagiarism checking software and its effectiveness in identifying misconduct.
Publication ethics are vitally important to editors and the scientific community as they are the foundation for the integrity of the published literature. The COPE seminar provided a supportive and collaborative forum for representatives from fields as diverse as dance, engineering and chemical physics to name but a few.
The audience was certainly captivated by the speakers and proceedings got underway with a presentation from Laurel L Haak, the Executive Director of ORCID, an international non-profit organisation. ORCID has the objective of providing a registry of unique research identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities to these identifiers. Their spokesperson on the day started with a quick survey of the audience's participation and compliance in reporting researchers identifiers in their publications. This was promptly followed by a plea for the research community to adopt and embrace unique and persistent identifiers to reduce ambiguity and promote identity in the peer review process and beyond.
Michael W Carroll from Creative Commons took up the torch next and shared his perspectives on mobile platforms, linked content and copyright. He stressed that copyright only attaches to 'works of authorship' which fall under the umbrella of original expressions of ideas and facts whilst the facts and ideas themselves remain free to copy. He discussed what copyright law provides for authors in terms of their power to control the distribution and dissemination of their research and pressed home that linking is generally not covered by copyright.
Mark Seely from Elsevier followed up with an insightful presentation on open access models and copyright. BioMed Central was included in his presentation as one of the early instigators of open access publications, well before funding agencies had expressed their support of open access publishing, he noted. The key take home message from the talk was that journal user licenses must be clear and concise.
One of the many highlights of the day was a panel discussion on the use of plagiarism checking software with representatives from different disciplines debating how routinely they perform checks on manuscripts as part of their assessment of new submissions and the process they follow should potential overlap in content be detected. Amongst the informative discussions, the majority of delegates indicated that despite any degree of assessment and analysis by software, a human judgment is always required to determine the nature and extent of overlap and the implications for the integrity of the scientific record. This session was followed by breakout workshops where specific cases were deliberated over and this culminated in the concluding remarks from COPE council member Charon Pierson about how editors share information about misconduct. Dr Pierson championed the collaborative nature of the field of publishing, the availability of supporting guidelines, and circulated COPE's new discussion document on the sharing of information among editors-in-chief regarding possible misconduct.
