EDITORS of medical journals should agree to expose dubious or unethical research submitted to them for publication, according to a proposed code of conduct. Editors signing up to the code would be obliged to blow the whistle on all types of bad practice and misconduct that in the past might simply have led to papers being rejected.
Published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which represents 178 mainly British medical journals, the code goes further than any other in obliging editors to blow the whistle. For instance, they would have to inform institutions where offending research was carried out,…
