Ethical aspects of conference proceedings

• Peer review practices for conference proceedings can differ considerably. Some conference committees use panels of reviewers who may make judgements simply on abstracts, or by scoring relative to other submissions rather than considering each submission on its own merits. Panel members may not be experts on the topic of each paper in the way that external reviewers for standard journal issues are and the review process often takes place during a limited time window. Others put submissions through multiple rounds of review both by the conference’s panel of experts and by the publisher’s editorial team in order to ensure standards that are comparable to a traditional journal issue. This can be a good way to signal good ethical practices, for example, when a proceedings journal is seeking inclusion on an indexing site. However, publishers approached with papers that have originated in conference proceedings may find it difficult to establish the nature and extent of the peer review applied and, thus, to decide whether they should be re-reviewed.
• Conference proceedings can take many forms, from short abstracts to multi-media presentations. There is also a growing number of conference proceeding journals which raises the profile of this topic, but also complicates decisions about their status relative to other journals.
• Publishers would benefit from guidance on their responsibility to check ethics approval in conference proceeding submissions. To do so would require a lot of effort, particularly when large numbers of abstracts are involved.
• There are no fixed guidelines on whether a publication in a conference proceeding can be published as a paper, or whether it needs to be significantly changed or extended first to avoid duplication or infringement of copyright. Potential criteria to judge this issue could be the inclusion of more analysis, or proportionate increase in length. A commonly applied rule of thumb is that the new submission be at least 30 per cent different from the conference proceeding paper. See the STM Permissions Guidelines (2022) for alternative proposals.
• There is potential for conflicts of interest where the person reviewing the papers submitted for conference proceedings is also the editor of the publication. There is also the potential for conflicts of interest when the conveners of the conference are the editors of the proceedings.
• Many of the issues raised here are the same as those associated with special issues of journals where editorial decisions are made outside the journal’s full editorial team. Where outsourced or local teams are used they can apply different editorial and publication ethics standards than the norm for the journal. Publishers should engage in thorough vetting of editorial teams in both cases to try to eliminate these risks and may choose to have all submissions go through the Editor in Chief as well so that they can be confident that the publication conforms to the journal’s standards.
• Many publishers have separate editorial and conference teams which can make it difficult to set and maintain ethical standards, especially over potential duplication. Liaison between such teams should be encouraged, particularly over issues such as the length and detail of conference proceedings.
• There is considerable variety in the way that conference proceedings are viewed and handled in different disciplines. Publishers would benefit from more research on this topic. In some cases, conference proceedings are seen primarily as a repository for preliminary research findings while in others they are a desirable output subjected to full peer review.
• Sometimes the same or very similar papers can be published in proceedings from multiple conferences which is counter to usual expectations of publication ethics (duplicate-redundant publication) in journals more broadly.
• Authorship changes are more likely to occur between the author list in the conference proceedings and any subsequent submission to a journal. This requires careful enquiry by the editorial team to determine the legitimacy of the change in authorship.  Publishers also need to consider whether a change in title or authorship is, in the absence of other differences, sufficient to eliminate duplicate publication.
• Conference proceedings are potentially vulnerable to activity from paper mills because of the volume of papers received and the possibility of a lighter peer review. Similar considerations apply to journal special issues, but the scale of conference proceedings can exacerbate the risk of being targeted and the work involved in investigating misconduct.
• Some conference proceedings are attached to journals with high impact factors, which makes them more desirable as publications. However, conference proceedings are now often indexed which has become the second most important factor for authors in selecting publication outlets. This further raises their profile within the scholarly community. More information on JATS tagging and conference proceedings from the National Library of Medicine.
• Where there is insufficient information about study design and meta-analysis in a conference proceeding it may be difficult for scholars to link reports of the same study. This can result in double counting when Cochrane-style literature surveys are being carried out. Publishers would benefit from advice on minimum standards of required information in publications in conference proceedings to avoid this lack of clarity.
• Individual submissions in conference proceedings will usually have their own DOI which is distinct from that of an eventual  full publication in a journal.

STM Permission Guidelines

National Library of Medicine, Journal Publishing Tag Set