A New Example of Unethical Behaviour in the Academic Journal “Medical Archives”

Recently at a meeting of the European Association of Science Editors Council, held in Split on June 13, 2014 I said that the editorial job in journals is serious, responsible, hard, and lately it also becomes dangerous. That job, really, requires, besides rich knowledge and experience, also “wasting” a lot of time, nerves and renunciation of all kinds in order that journals that we edit, in their final form are rich with content, contains articles of superior/ high scientific quality, results of research that can interest potential readers and users of scientific published content, but also linguistically, aestheticly and technically acceptable to attract and meet the needs and taste of potential readers. All above mentioned is sometimes very easily unsuccessful or the efforts of the publishers, which have the teams of qualified and capable associates involved in at least six of technological stages–from submission, editing, linguistic and technical preparations, printing, converting in the XLM format for on-line databases and painstaking process of communication with authors and co-authors that sometimes become unsuccessful and very frustrating. Unfortunately, this last mentioned can make life difficult for the editor and shake or diminish his/hers sense of love and pleasures for this beautiful and above all socially useful, but hard work in all scientific and academic community centers in any country and at any level of its development. The latest example of unethical behavior by one (or more authors) who have submitted their article in the Medical Archives to be published is so blatant that I decided to present it in this editorial. This is because I had to exchange with the author so much information and to present many evidences about the ethical tackle that written words and sentences have almost become the tools of criminal-legal process and if there are institutions and mechanisms, maybe I would start a lawsuit for academic humiliation and insult. On the written warning by a respected fellow scientist (Figure 1), that I at least could publish as The Letter to the Editor, because it is written in such form (but my colleague asked to remain anonymous in this text, because he himself experienced unpleasant mails from the author of the article in question) I sent a letter to the authors and warned them that the article, which was sent for publication in the Medical Archives (and which is for long time visible on PubMed), cannot be send to another journal (in this case ISRN Nephrology), because this violates the rules, codes and guidelines of COPE, EASE, WAME, ICMJE, etc., and that this process can follow appropriate penal consequences. After this started unpleasant correspondence through mails (which are also evidence in the legal sense), which was at the end devaluated to a mere explanation that three of my mails to the author from which I requested to comply with the rules that are written and publicly accessible by the mentioned association and to be followed by every editorial board of scientific journal which want to be taken seriously and which are transparently published on the website of the journal and listed in the Instructions for authors, ended in his spam box. Unfortunately, the main argument that I mentioned to the authors is that they could not send the same article, completely identical by content, in other journals and that they did not officially make a request to me as Editor of Medical Archives to withdraw the article from their own motives and reasons. The authors did not even want to accept certain steps that are obligatory, published on the official website through which their article is submitted. Part of the facts that I’ve described in this text is contained in the facts as scans of a letter that I have exchanged with a fellow scientist and which prove or substantiate my claims. The fact is that unethical behavior in the academic community has become a kind of disease that every day takes the character of an epidemic. About Plagiarism in a scientific publications and other forms of unethical behavior in a scientific publication, I wrote a book that has aroused the attention of many colleagues, but also a series of articles that have been published in several scientific journals that can be downloaded from PubMed, PubMed Central and from other databases that cooperate with PubMed. These forms of behavior have existed much earlier but there were no technological possibilities and advantages (especially software packages to search the contents of the articles and books) that is now possible to discover them so fast and easy as today. True, even today, especially in EDITORIAL doi: 10.5455/medarh.2014.68.228-230