Report from the Scientific Integrity Advisor

Abstract

I became the Scientific Integrity Advisor of Neurology in 2004,1 and summarized the issues we encountered during that first year.2 In that summary, I am embarrassed to report that in citing the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), we erroneously printed their URL as icjme.org and not icmje.org. An alert reader notified us that icjme.org was a pornographic site, containing images of nude celebrities. We immediately alerted the publisher, who corrected the error in the electronic versions, and we published a Correction in the next issue. Our publisher contacted the ICMJE, advising them to file a complaint with a domain dispute resolution committee, as it is apparently a violation of Internet registration policies to intentionally post unrelated material on misspelled domain names. In logging on to icjme.org in January 2007, I was pleasantly greeted by a notice that my organization's Internet Use Policy restricts access to the Web site because of its “adult content.” Throughout this report of years 2 and 3, I use the pronoun “he” to refer to all authors, regardless of their sex, rather than the awkward “he/she” or “s/he” constructions; thus, not all the offenders were men. We had two unresolved issues when I wrote …