Threats to the integrity of the Croatian Medical Journal: an update.

the editorial from the last issue of the Croa-tian Medical Journal (CMJ), we described the challenge to the quality of the Journal and integrity of its editors, put forward by one of the Journal owners – Zagreb University School of Medicine , at its Council meeting in November 2007 (1). We invited our critics – the dean of the Za-invited to speak about the CMJ at the Council meeting, to voice their concerns over the quality of the Journal and the work of its editors-in-chief (1). Although we received a number of responses from Journal readers and authors, there was no reply from the Dean or Prof. Vukičević, not even an acknowledgment of receipt of our formal invitation to submit a critique of our stewardship of CMJ. The School administration also did not reply to our request for answers about the outcome of CMJ's report to the Dean on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) expertise on redundant publications of Prof. Asim Kur-jak in the CMJ (1,2). Neither the Dean of the School nor the Rector of the Zagreb University, Prof. Aleksa Bjeliš, replied to the direct request of COPE's Chairman, Dr Harvey Marcovitch, about their evaluation of findings for the CMJ (3). As Dr Marcovitch explained in the BMJ, he received a prompt and detailed account from the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports, whereas neither the Dean nor the Rector " has seen fit to reply " to his letters (4). The Dean, Prof. Čikeš, did not reply to the CMJ's invitation, but many things happened after the meeting of the School's Council on No-vember 27, 2007, and our December editorial (1). A week after the Council meeting in No-vember, one of us (Ana Marušić) received a request from the School's Court of Honor to appear at the Court's ruling on December 12, 2007, to answer the charges put forward by the Dean, Prof. Čikeš, based on anonymous accusations against the two editors of a textbook of anatomy for first year medical students. The Dean, Prof. Čikeš, submitted Prof. Marušić (but not the first editor of the textbook) to a number of investigations by unofficial committees in 2006 and 2007, finally filing an action to the Court of Honor, despite the fact that the textbook editors and the publisher provided relevant documentation that answered the questions put by the unofficial …