Authors, editors and ethical ways of working.

Abstract

I write this as we prepare for the 1st International Care Ethics Observatory Conference and the 16th Nursing Ethics Conference. This year the theme is ‘The Future of Ethics in Care’. We had over 90 abstract submissions from 26 countries and are looking forward to much lively discussion and cross-cultural exchanges. We are delighted to have Professor Joan Tronto as our keynote speaker and to have other eminent colleagues on our three plenary panels exploring political, regulatory, interprofessional and international perspectives on ethics and care. The themes of the parallel sessions are wide-ranging and include ethics and dementia care, ethics in care homes, end-of-life ethics, research ethics, dignity in care, compassion, clinical ethics, moral distress, ethical climate and philosophical perspectives on ethics. We encourage all conference contributors to consider developing their presentations as manuscripts for submission to Nursing Ethics. My recent experiences suggest that not all authors have a good understanding of the editorial process and not all authors and editors understand each other as well as they might. A Nursing Ethics author withdrew her manuscript following review when asked to submit a statement detailing how she had responded to each of the reviewers’ comments and also a copy of the revised manuscript with tracked or highlighted changes. She had submitted her changes with comments in the manuscript, and it was difficult to determine whether she had responded to the reviewers’ comments adequately. The withdrawal of the manuscript was unfortunate as the article was interesting, Nursing Ethics reviewers had taken the time to comment and, if she had submitted the revisions as requested, the manuscript was likely to have been accepted for publication. Another author emailed to say she had contacted the journal ‘numerous’ times and wanted to know what was taking us so long to make a judgement on her manuscript. After checking the inbox, I wrote to her saying that I found one previous email and that 2–3 months was not such a long time in review for an international peer-reviewed journal. We are reliant on the goodwill and generosity of busy reviewers. I asked about her previous publication experience. The author responded that she had no previous experience of writing for an international journal. A third experience resulted in my withdrawal from writing a column for a UK nursing journal. The column idea was interesting, that is, to write responses to readers’ ethical queries. I was asked to provide a couple of examples to move the column forward which I did. The proofs of the first article were received, checked by me, published and a PDF sent to me when the article appeared. The second proof was emailed to me when I was overseas without a deadline for my comments or a proposed date of publication. When I emailed to enquire about submitting comments, I received no response from the editor. Some weeks later, a colleague showed me the published piece that had been changed by the editor and that I had not approved. I was unhappy with the editor’s insertions regarding the profile of a researcher in the field of moral distress. I know all too well that it is unwise – and unnecessary – to categorise eminent researchers who have rich