Elsevier has always been committed to setting the highest standards for ethical publishing behavior, both in our publishing process and in our policies. But for the first time, all of those ethics policies and procedures are now available in one place on Elsevier.com. Mark Seeley, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, and Federica Rosetta, Publishing Editor for Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Science Journals, have helped to establish the team that created PERK – the   Publishing Ethics Resource Kit.

When journal editors encounter a situation in which unethical behavior is suspected, it is their responsibility, as part of the peer-review process, to evaluate, investigate and make a final decision about the appropriate action to take. “But it is the role of publishing editors to provide whatever assistance and support they can,” Rosetta explains.

As early as 2005, Elsevier’s publishing staff was discussing policy approaches to retractions and removals of problematic articles, plagiarism, multiple submissions and other ethical concerns. “As more policies were developed, it became clear that these all needed to be collected together in a logical way,” explains Seeley.

Rosetta continues, “We knew that different checklists and procedures were also being used by various publishing editors throughout the company in response to specific experiences and queries, and we wanted to collect all of their valuable information in one place.”

Responding to the call
While publishing editors were doing their best to help journal editors make these difficult decisions, they still felt like more support was needed. “Journal editors first raised the idea of an Ethics Helpdesk at one of our editors’ conferences,” Seeley says. “They wanted to be able to call or email with questions about ethics issues they encountered.”

In September of 2006, the Ethics Helpdesk was launched as a pilot program. It was a combination of helpline support via phone and email, a comprehensive guide to all of Elsevier’s policies and procedures with regard to ethics issues, and a ‘procedural manual’ with checklists and form letters for the different types of issues.

“There was a large surge of calls and emails to the Helpdesk when we first launched,” Seeley continues, “but we began to notice an interesting trend. As more and more publishing editors got hold of the Ethics ‘manual’ contact with the Helpdesk began to drop off.” The Helpdesk team realized that making the manual more widely available would be the key to assisting publishing editors with their queries about ethics. It was right at this stage that the PERK team first got together and started to work on a framework proposal.

Building the tools
The two teams ‘merged together’ and focused on creating the most comprehensive, user-friendly, easy-to-navigate guide they could. They knew that the best way to streamline the guide was to make it digital. Thus, the first stage of PERK – the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit – was born.

Launched on World Medical Ethics Day, September 19, 2007, PERK was initially released as an internal pilot resource for Elsevier’s publishing editors, and was available on the company’s Intranet, Nonsolus, before moving to the Elsevier.com site five months later.

“We established a central ‘resource center’ where publishing editors could get everything they need – policies, checklists and communication tools – from a single point of entry, and then use the information to guide journal editors,” Rosetta recalls. “The first step was to collect, assemble, update and recheck every bit of information to ensure that it was complete.”

The team then went even further. “Many specific circumstances surround each case,” Seeley says. “We needed to broaden our scope to help editors identify their unique situation in the guide.”

The PERK team set about organizing the ethics guide to address various issues, such as how the author accused of misconduct might respond to charges of unethical behavior. They added and revised tools and form letters to help publishing editors find out precisely the situation that their journal editors were facing and the right communication to use. “We used a lot of ‘if’ statements,” Rosetta explains, “as in, ‘if the corresponding author rejects the position of the complainant...’, along with a form letter that the editor could use to pursue the matter further.”

The next step was to provide external support and validation. For this, the PERK team turned to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE), one of the most highly respected ethics organizations in scientific publishing. COPE had already produced ‘decision trees’ – step-by-step, visual representations of the appropriate steps to take in any given situation of misconduct. “Because the COPE procedures so closely matched our own, we were offered a licensing agreement and we were able to add the COPE decision trees to PERK,” Rosetta says.

Today, all Elsevier journals are registered with COPE, which means that if journal editors are still unsure of the right plan of action after visiting PERK and discussing options with the publishing editor, they can take their most complex cases to COPE for further discussion.

PERK offers other tools, such as the ‘Identify your case’ functionality, to help editors define and identify their ethics issue quickly and easily. PERK then leads them to the right set of resources to handle that issue.

Comprehensive case studies outline specific, anonymous cases taken either from actual Elsevier editor experiences or from COPE’s extensive archive. The case studies provide even clearer indications of the right course of action in almost any misconduct situation.

The extensive ‘Q&A’ section represents a valuable resource of useful information in reply to a large number of questions that were identified by the PERK team when reviewing the case studies and decision trees.

Broadening the scope
Although PERK was originally available on Nonsolus, it was always the team’s intention to take it public. “PERK does not contain privileged information,” Seeley says, “but useful resources that can help many editors deal appropriately with misconduct. Making it available on the Internet was the next logical step. We knew taking the kit public would benefit not only Elsevier’s journal editors, but journal and publishing editors from external companies, as well.”

In February of 2008, PERK officially went live on   elsevier.com, just in time for the Editors’ Conference in Singapore. Response to the release was highly favorable.

But the PERK team has little time to celebrate their success. “It will be an ongoing task to keep PERK up-to-date and comprehensive,” Rosetta says. “We will be constantly looking for gaps, changes in policies or new situations that need to be addressed.”

Seeley agrees. “Even at the Singapore conference, editors identified other areas of interest to them, such as a basic standard of ethics regarding animal testing, and ethical guidelines that can be incorporated into instructions to authors. We’re already looking into those kinds of additions, and we encourage journal editors to visit PERK and continue to send us feedback and suggestions.”

To cite this article, please use: Toni Bellanca, "A little PERK adds a lot of support", Elsevier Editors' Update, Issue 22, May 2008

Related Links
  PERK

  COPE

  CrossCheck plagiarism software pilot

Please send responses to: EditorsUpdate@elsevier.com