CATEGORY TWO:
Codes in this category are "recommended ethical behaviour". Flagrant disregard
of these or other kinds of professional etiquette, while less serious,
can result in damage to your reputation, editorial sanctions, professional
embarrassment, legal action, and the ill will of your colleagues. While
individual scholars may disagree about the most appropriate action to take
in a particular situation, a broad consensus exists that the issues listed
below are problematic and need to be handled carefully.
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3. Respect the
rights of research subjects, particularly their rights to information privacy,
to being informed about the nature of the research and the types of activities
in which they will be asked to engage.
Scholars are expected to maintain, uphold
and promote the rights of research subjects, especially rights associated
with their information privacy. Subjects in academic research routinely
volunteer information about their behaviour, attitudes, intellect, abilities,
experience, health, education, emotions, aspirations, and so on. If you
are collecting such data, you have an obligation to respect the confidentiality
of your subjects by storing data in a secure place, destroying it after
a specified period of time, and never using it for any purpose other than
that to which the subjects agreed prior to their participation. In addition,
unless an institutionally-approved research protocol allows otherwise,
research subjects should be informed in advance of the purpose of any research
procedure or activities in which they may be asked to participate. They
also have the right to withdraw from the research at any stage. Researchers
must respect these rights and not coerce or otherwise force research subjects
to participate against their will, or in a manner that is not conducive
with their best interests.
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4. Do not submit
for publication or presentation articles or papers you have already published
elsewhere.
Academic journals and conference proceedings
are the public record of original scientific achievement. As such, they
rarely if ever republish an article which has appeared previously. Thus,
you should not submit a manuscript which is identical or very similar to
work you have published previously (or which has been accepted elsewhere
for publication). Such a manuscript, if detected, would normally be rejected
by the editor. See “Avoid self-plagiarism” in Good Advice below.
There are naturally exceptions to the above guidelines for reprints of
an article in an edited collection or book. The highly recommended
guideline here applies only to resubmission of previously published work
to journals and conferences.”
Presenting a paper at a conference to obtain
comment and discussion, and then later revising the paper for submission
to a journal is another legitimate exception. However, in such cases,
prudence suggests that you alert the editor in your submission letter and
in the article draw the reader’s attention to the conference paper, perhaps
by a footnote at the bottom of the first page.
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5. Do not abuse
the authority and responsibility you have been given as an editor, reviewer
or supervisor, and take care to ensure that no personal relationship will
result in a situation that might interfere with your objective judgement.
Editors, reviewers and supervisors are by
definition in a position of authority over others. Under no circumstances
should you use your position for personal advantage (such as by coercion)
or to the disadvantage of others. You should also take care that any personal
relationship that pre-exists or develops during the course of the editorial
or supervisory process does not interfere with your ability to be objective.
If such a situation does prevail, then you should voluntarily withdraw
from any decision making concerning the individual with whom the relationship
exists.
As an editor or reviewer, you also have
an ethical obligation to complete your reviews and review-related actions
in a timely fashion. Some journals have been known to take a year or more
to complete a single round of reviews on a manuscript, which is unacceptable.
Editors and reviewers should work together to ensure a prompt review cycle
ideally not exceeding three months from the date of receipt of the manuscript
to the date a decision has been communicated to the author(s).
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6. Reveal to funding
agencies or universities any material conflict of interest, financial or
otherwise, that might interfere with your ability to be objective and impartial
when reviewing grant applications, software, or when undertaking work from
outside sources.
Scholars are routinely involved in reviewing
submissions for journals, conferences, granting agencies, job applications,
cases involving promotion or tenure, book manuscripts, and occasionally
product (especially software) assessments. But conflicts of interest can
and do arise in a relatively tight academic community. Such conflicts may
involve personal, scholarly, financial or other relationships – any relationship
which might interfere with your ability to remain objective and impartial.
For example, tenure and promotion policies in some universities specifically
preclude doctoral supervisors, co-authors, or other research collaborators
from serving as external referees due to the potential for a conflict of
interest. You must reveal to any relevant parties any conflict of interest
prior to agreeing to undertake any review, assessment or critique.
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7. Do not take
or use published data of others without acknowledgement or unpublished
data without both permission and acknowledgement.
Compiling a set of data, whether from the
field, lab, or secondary sources, may require a substantial investment
of time, energy, and financial resources. Participants in the compilation
of a data set are said to be the "owners" (though individuals such as students
hired to collect data may not qualify. Just as you should not use someone
else’s "real property" without their permission, neither should you use
or publish from someone else's data set, i.e., their "intellectual property”,
without their permission. However, data appearing as part of a publication
is by definition in the public record and may be used without permission,
though not without acknowledgement. An unpublished data set belongs to
others and, to avoid ill will at least, should not be used without the
permission and acknowledgement of each of the data set owners. See “Settle
data ownership issues before data compilation” in Good Advice below.
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8. Do not submit
for publication a manuscript that is currently under review until a publication
decision has been received or the submission has been withdrawn.
Editors and reviewers are unpaid: they volunteer
and contribute their own scarce resources of time and energy as a service
to the academic community. Hence submitting a manuscript which is already
under review elsewhere abuses everyone involved (at each of the journals)
and squanders valuable resources. It misrepresents a piece of scholarly
work as available for publication whereas the intent of the author may
be to withdraw the piece upon receiving acceptance from the most preferred
(or first) journal responding. Editors detecting such misrepresentation
may choose to withdraw the manuscript from the review process, inform other
journals of the matter, and blacklist the author from future submissions
to the journal. If you wish to withdraw a manuscript from a review process
then you should keep all correspondence associated with the withdrawal
process, should you have a future need to verify the withdrawal.
Note that scholars sometimes submit to
a journal a manuscript they have submitted (or are also submitting) for
presentation at a conference. Provided this is made clear to the journal
editor, and the proceedings editor, and neither has any concerns, this
practice presents no ethical issues. However the published article should
cite any earlier appearance in conference proceedings.
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9. Acknowledge
the substantive contributions of all research participants, whether colleagues
or students, but only according to their intellectual contribution.
Since authorship implies a readiness to take
public responsibility for the intellectual activity involved in a publication,
only those who have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the
research should be listed as authors. Submitting a manuscript to which
non-participating authors are added, for whatever purpose, is a form of
misrepresentation. However, each true participant in the work, whether
colleagues, students or other research assistants, should be acknowledged
according
to their intellectual contribution to the final product. Such acknowledgment
may occur in the form of author inclusion, authorship order, by footnote,
or by mention in the text. Thus, a colleague who provides seminal thought
or performs as the intellectual leader of the effort but who may have done
little actual writing may qualify as an author. By the same token, a colleague
who performs sophisticated data analyses but who may have only peripheral
interest in the subject matter may also be included as an author – again
according to the intellectual contribution of the analyses performed. By
contrast, a research assistant who collects the data set, however substantial,
may only qualify for much lesser acknowledgement in the absence of other
significant intellectual contribution.
Individuals responsible for major parts
of the funding of a project are occasionally given full authorship credit.
Practice varies in this regard, but such attribution should be avoided
wherever possible since there is no inherent connection between intellectual
contribution and financial contribution. The IS community generally
interprets an attribution of authorship as a recognition of substantive
contribution to the research, not as knowledge of how best to fund a project.
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10. Do not use unpublished
writings, information, ideas, concepts or data that you may see as a result
of processes (such as peer review) without permission of the author.
When you serve as a reviewer or editor, you
gain privileged access to documents in the review process. Reviewers and
editors must respect this privilege by maintaining the confidentiality
of information seen in the review process. If you wish to cite or otherwise
use or distribute such unpublished material, you should do so only with
prior permission of the author. Editors of all ranks accept this duty of
confidentiality and must ensure that reviewers are similarly bound.
Independent of a review process, you may
receive unpublished work by way of working papers, visiting scholar research
seminars, and even in the recruiting process as candidates present a paper
as part of a recruiting visit. Not infrequently, the cover page on such
work will indicate “not to be quoted without permission of the author”.
But where it does not, the rule still holds – do not use or quote such
material without obtaining prior permission of the author. Simply being
careful to provide full author acknowledgement (which you must do in any
case) is insufficient; until published, the ideas and content of the manuscript
are the property of the author. Keep in mind that working papers sometimes
remain in circulation long after the paper, or a close version of it, has
appeared in print, perhaps even under a different title. The author and
you will both prefer that you are quoting a paper which has survived peer
review and thus carries the credibility of the journal or conference proceedings
in which it appeared. An author may have also decided, for legitimate scholarly
reasons, not to publish the paper in any form; quoting without permission
would act against the author’s wishes and would frustrate that end.
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11. Use archival material
only in accordance with the rules of the archival source.
Archived material, often in the form of digital
libraries, is made available to subscribing members of professional societies.
This archived material is usually subject to rules on dissemination, citation,
copying and so on. Such rules may be in place to meet copyright or other
legal requirements and must be respected. In some jurisdictions, flagrant
disregard of copyright laws can result in very substantial fines.
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12. Authors may place working
paper versions of their articles on their own website.
Authors may place working paper versions of
their articles on their personal web site and permit free public reading
and distribution. Citation information may be included when the article
has been accepted for publication. Authors posting material on a password-protected
basis for the purpose of avoiding potential copyright violations are advised
to consult a university lawyer regarding the legality of the arrangement.
Page proofs or other imprints with the logo of the outlet publishing your
article should not appear on the web document unless the editor-in-chief
of the publication has given explicit permission.
GOOD
ADVICE: Some suggestions on how to protect yourself from authorship
disputes, mis-steps, mistakes, and even legal action.
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1. Maintain in a timely fashion
documentation and data necessary to validate your original authorship for
each scholarly work with which you are connected.
Plagiarism may be the most egregious and
damaging form of scholarly misconduct. It is also likely the most traumatic
for all involved – those plagiarised, those who plagiarise (and are detected),
editors, reviewers, colleagues, department heads, and even deans. But the
damage from plagiarism of your work may be much more easily and successfully
redressed if you maintain a “paper trail”, i.e., documents (hardcopy or
electronic) which establish your true authorship.
Consider the following defensive measure.
For each scholarly work with which you are involved, maintain at appropriate
levels of currency and detail, all information necessary to establish that
you are the original author, should your authorship be disputed. This includes
correspondence (whether electronic or paper) with editors, reviewers, and
publishers and early versions of the manuscript. Other materials of value
include reviewer comments and rejection letters if the manuscript was submitted
for publication; and any related working papers, conference proceedings
and research grants. Dated materials are particularly important in this
situation since they can serve as the strongest evidence of your original
authorship. For further advice in dealing with a situation in which you
feel your work has been plagiarized, please see Guidelines for a Victim.
Maintain such files for at least five years, and perhaps as long as ten,
though this may depend on the nature of your work.
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2.Avoid"self plagiarism".
As your research program and publications
unfold, you will commonly cite and describe your prior work. In fact, reviewing
your own research stream may be the only practical way to provide the context
necessary for the new work you are discussing. This is especially true
if you are pioneering in a niche area. But you should not attempt to build
a new article largely from a re-working of your previous publications.
Even this advice is subject to exception – as when a scholar re-weaves
the threads of previous thought to reveal new patterns, perspectives or
insights, or seeks to provide a comprehensive summary or “state of the
art” report on a particular research stream.
An ancillary problem with even modest self-citation
however is that it can subvert the “blind reviewing” process, a feature
that helps to preserve reviewer and editor objectivity. If citing your
own work will reveal your authorship of a manuscript, you should consider
disguising the citations with a phrase such as “author’s name withheld
to retain review blindness”. Even so, this may prove to be cosmetic as
a knowledgeable reviewer is often sufficiently familiar with the literature
to quickly identify the author of work cited. Still, you should do your
best to disguise your authorship.
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3. Settle data set ownership
issues before data compilation.
Curiously, disputes over data sets are more
likely to occur between collaborating researchers than with others. For
example, data may be collected and analysed by a research team, but later
a team member separately publishes an article reporting new analyses of
the data. Other team members cry "foul" but the author argues that the
work in question was not envisaged when the data set was first collected.
Furthermore, he argues, as a co-owner of the data set, he should have the
right to publish from it without seeking the permission of other co-owners.
The foregoing is but a single example of countless possible disputes regarding
the use of data sets - disputes for which there may be no clear-cut resolution
but which can nonetheless result in severe inter-personal disagreements
and recrimination.
To avoid such situations, collaborating
scholars should reach an explicit agreement (in writing) on the use of
a data set, ideally prior to its compilation; the agreement should
include the acknowledgment necessary to satisfy the co-owners, should a
publication result. The acknowledgment may be as modest as a footnote,
or as significant as co-authorship, depending on the co-owners’ intellectual
contribution to the publication. In general, in no case should you risk
the ill will of your colleagues or accusations of misbehaviour by failing
to secure explicit prior permission (in writing) to use a data set, whether
or not you are a co-owner.
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4.Consult senior colleagues
if in doubt.
Learning the finer points of scholarly etiquette
is a slow process. Even experienced scholars sometimes disagree on what
constitutes acceptable behaviour or whether or not a particular act is
ethical. But if you have doubts about how to behave or deal with a particular
research or publishing situation, we strongly recommend that you consult
with a senior colleague. With the benefit of greater experience and exposure
to such matters, senior colleagues may be more sensitive than you to the
complexities of formal scholarship and in recognizing when an ethical dilemma
may be present.