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Helen Gainford
Q: What is Elsevier's position on publishing ethics?
A: Over the past few years, Elsevier editors have noticed a significant increase in the number of cases of plagiarism that they have had to deal with. Elsevier believes that monitoring publishing ethics is a major aspect of the peer-review process, and as such lies within the area of responsibility of the editor-in-chief, or the scientific editor, of each journal.
As part of our commitment to the protection and enhancement of peer review, our publishing team offers editors assistance and guidance in these matters. Publishing ethics issues that editors face include an author copying a substantial part of another's work without acknowledgment or passing another's work off as her or his own; fraudulent research; and authorship disputes.
In 2007, Elsevier set up a pilot Ethics Helpdesk, where editors could submit ethics queries and get assistance on how to handle them. During that year, it became clear that editors were asking for helpful tools.
Hence, in 2008, we set up the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit website
on the Elsevier Editors site at www.elsevier.com/publishingethicskit.
The PERK site provides links to Elsevier and non-Elsevier
policy and procedures documents; flow charts to guide editors
through dealing with different forms of publishing ethics
abuse; template letters to adapt and use for various situations;
and Q&A information.
Besides providing this online resource,
Elsevier has also signed up to the Committee
on Publishing Ethics. COPE is a charitable
organization that provides a forum for scientific
journal editors and publishers to discuss issues
relating to the
integrity of the
work submitted to
or published in
their journals. Enlisting journals in COPE ensures our editors
have an independent source to refer to when dealing with
publishing ethics issues.
Further, Elsevier has collaborated with CrossRef in the plagiarism
software project CrossCheck. This involves running similarity
checks on submitted papers against a database of over 25 million
published articles. If a paper shows a similarity with any article in
the database, CrossCheck produces a report giving the percentage
of similarity and highlights the section where the similarity occurs.
This spring, 90 Elsevier journals are starting to run papers through
CrossCheck on a random basis. As we monitor its success, more
Elsevier journals will be included in the CrossCheck initiative. 
h.gainford@elsevier.com
COPE: http://publicationethics.org
CrossCheck: www.elsevier.com/editors/plagdetect
PERK: www.elsevier.com/publishingethicskit
