POSSIBLE BREACH OF CONFIDENTIALITY BY A REVIEWER
One of the figures in an article under review was said by the authors to appear in a presentation given at a conference while the paper was still under review and from this identified the reviewer and accused this person of abusing their position.
When contacted by editorial office, the reviewer confirmed that s/he did use some data previously presented by this group of authors but in no way used this figure and did credit the authors. The reviewer had deleted the slides. The authors claim that the figure presented by the reviewer was identical to that in their paper under review and could not have been created using any of their previously presented data.
The referee was removed from the list of reviewers for this article and told why, although the reviewer insists that no figure was used from this paper. The authors wanted us to remove the referee from editorial database completely and when editorial disagreed with this, withdrew their article. They have since requested to reinstate the article. The editor declined this request as the paper was unlikely to be recommended for publication in any case for scientific reasons.
COPE advice
This case regarding the conduct of a reviewer prompted mixed views from the committee. Some argued that the reviewer should be permanently removed from the journal’s list while others argued that such action was too harsh. Bearing in mind that there was no hard evidence, most agreed that the editor had acted correctly.
