The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently conducted a meeting which discussed the ethics of scientific publishing. Diane Scott-Lichter of the Council of Science Editors and Michael Zigmond, Editor-in-Chief of Progress in Neuroscience, raised issues such as plagiarism, fabricated data, undeserved authorship and image manipulation.
Zigmund described working within the Society for Neuroscience to create a set of ethical guidelines, and mentioned a number of topics that produced substantial disagreements within the working group that drafted them. These include fast-tracking some publications in the light of their profile or competition in the field, setting formal criteria for authorship and prior publication, sharing of published reagents, and the enforcement responsibility for violations of these guidelines. According to observers, the fact that these issues were hard to address suggests that there is both a lot of honest disagreement and context-dependent decision making going on within the scientific community. Ana Marusic, Editor-in-Chief of the Croatian Medical Journal, spoke on the challenges she faced in arranging for the first publication by a Serbian group after the war, with an emphasis on ensuring that everyone involved felt it was handled fairly.
The panel concluded with a response by Donald Kennedy, the departing editor of Science. Kennedy mostly agreed with the presentations, but mentioned topics that he felt were not covered well. He stated that standards vary by field, so 'one size fits all' rules will never work. He also suggested that security issues are more likely to intrude upon the peer review process in a way that leaves editors with little control. The discussion dug into the anonymity of peer review from a number of angles.
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