If you believe that a paper fails to follow professional ethics, such as with plagiarism or self-plagiarism, do the following:

  1. Do not reject the paper. Instead, let the paper stay in the queue. While it is in our queue, email the Executive Director of your concern and, in that email, provide all the evidence you assembled. The Board of Governors’ policy directs the Executive Director (ED) to investigate such cases.
  2. Do not put yourself at risk by accusing the authors of anything. You can and should ask the author for information; don’t accuse. You could use wording such as:

I noticed that the paper you submitted [PID] was previously checked for similarity with other papers and so entered into a database maintained by TurnItIn. On the face of it, this looks like you submitted a paper written by another.

I need your help to clear up this matter. Please provide me with an explanation by [DATE] why your paper is shown in the Turnitin database. If you need a bit more time to submit your explanation, just ask. Be sure to attach to your explanation whatever documentation that you can add.

  1. If the response is not satisfactory, email the ED (see https://www.informingscience.org/Community/ISITeam) to ask the ED to open an investigation. In your email to the ED, provide full and detailed information with copies of the documents your internal investigations already uncovered. This might include copies of the “other” paper and possibly an annotated copy of the submission that shows duplication. The ED will prepare a report for the Board of Governors, and that body will decide if professional sanctions are to be imposed.

What you need to know about Corresponding Authors. Before we leave this step, know that once the corresponding author submits the paper, the system emails only the corresponding author. Co-authors see all the information about the paper in their dashboard, but only the corresponding author can upload revisions.

From your dashboard, you can change which co-author is the corresponding author, change the order of co-authorship, delete a non-corresponding co-author, and even add a new co-author, as seen in Figure 38. Do this only rarely!

Figure 35. From the SUBMISSION tab, you can see the author's information,
change the order of authorship, delete an author, and add a new co-author. But read why you shouldn’t do this.

If the authorship changes, contact your Managing Editor. Since the system does not send verification emails to the co-authors that you add, do this only if you receive an email from the co-author asking to be added (see coauthor_letter).

In summary, when a “corresponding author” submits a paper, the author has already filled in details of any co-authors (Step 2) and then filled in the paper topics (Step 3). Each co-author then receives an email asking if they accept co-authorship. Once all co-authors verify their co-authorship, the corresponding author will be able to submit the paper. This step is necessary to ensure that co-authors don’t submit the same paper to a different journal and accept co-authorship. After the author has completed all the steps, the system notifies you that you have a new submission to download and review.