A 10-year follow up of publishing ethics in China: what is new and what is unchanged

Jun Xu,Katrina A Bramstedt

doi:10.1186/s41073-019-0077-3

Abstract

BackgroundOrgan donation and transplantation in China are ethically complex due to questionable informed consent and the use of prisoners as donors. Publishing works from China can be problematic. The objective of this study was to perform a 10-year follow up on Chinese journals active in donation and transplant publishing regarding the evolution of their publishing guidelines.MethodsEleven Chinese journals were analyzed for 7 properties: (1) ethics committee approval; (2) procedure consent; (3) publishing consent; (4) authorship criteria; (5) conflict of interest; (6) duplicate publication; and (7) data integrity. Results were compared with our 2008 study data. Additionally, open access status, impact factor, and MEDLINE-indexing were explored.ResultsMost journals heightened the ethical requirements for publishing, compared to the results of 2008. All 11 now require their published manuscripts to have data integrity. Ten of 11 require ethics committee approval and informed consent for the publication of research studies, whereas in the original study only 2 journals evidenced these requirements. Nine of 11 have criteria for authorship, require conflict of interest disclosure, and forbid duplicate publishing. None of the journals have a policy to exclude data that was obtained from unethical organ donation practices. Nine of 11 journals are MEDLINE-indexed but only 2 are open-access.ConclusionsMost journals have improved their general ethical publishing requirements but none address unethical organ donation practices.

Highlights

Organ donation and transplantation in China are ethically complex due to questionable informed consent and the use of prisoners as donors
Nine of 11 (81.8%) journals have criteria for authorship, require conflict of interest disclosure, and forbid duplicate publishing practices
It is important to note that organ donation is an altruistic social good that promotes the goals of medicine, is it unfortunate that only 2 of 11 (18.2%) journals in our analysis provide their full-text articles free to scientists, physicians, and the lay public via open access

Summary

Introduction

Organ donation and transplantation in China are ethically complex due to questionable informed consent and the use of prisoners as donors. Does a decade change much for transplant publishing ethics in China? In 2008, the publishing practices of numerous medical journals which are active in the field of solid organ transplantation were explored [1]. Transplantation in China is controversial due to unethical practices such as the use of prisoners as organ donors and lack of informed consent [2]. Journals which adhere to standard ethical guidelines such as those from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors [3] forbid publishing of articles which lack ethical assurances such as informed consent and research ethics committee review, but as shown a decade

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