One of my friends submitted a case report to a reputable European journal more than 6 months ago. He received an email to confirm the receipt of his article two days after the submission via email, but he has not received any mail regarding the reviewers' comments or any final decision from the editor. He has sent four emails to ask about the editor's decision or the review process, but has not received any reply either.
 

I know that he can write a letter to withdraw his case report, but can WAME prevent such misconduct? Or, is there any rule regarding such problems in medical journalism ethics? Can we name such journals in the WAME board.

Behrooz Astaneh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences

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Before assuming misconduct, I think a telephone call to the editor and/or the editorial office is warranted. Firewalls and other Internet problems may prevent the transmission of messages. Until a direct phone call occurs to see exactly what happened, I think it would be premature to call this misconduct.

David C. Cone
Senior Associate Editor, Academic Emergency Medicine
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Thanks for your prompt response. Yes, he tried to call the office without success. The journal is related to a famous publisher that supports several journals. The secretary asked him to email the journal.

Firewall and Internet problems are not the issue  because he has received the confirmation mail for submission his article.

Behrooz Astaneh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences
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Unfortunately, sometimes firewalls and spam-detectors are designed to be sensitive to a specific domain or particular word and receiving the confirmation email technically, does not prove that your friend's next emails were also received by the editorial office. On the other hand, the firewall installed on your friend's mail-server may delete the incoming emails from the editorial office. As an example, until a couple of months ago, the mail server of "sums.ac.ir" removed all the emails from the domain "smj.org.sa" permanently without any messages. (I do not know its current status.) Therefore, like Dave, I also believe that your friend should contact the editorial office of that journal out of band.

Farrokh Habibzadeh
Archives of Iranian Medicine
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I would not assume that just because an email went through properly 6 months ago that they are now. I had been emailing a managing director of a company regarding a business issue when, after 2 months of discussion, my emails were not being answered. I thought this very strange behaviour as they had approached me in this first place. When I contacted the company by phone it turned out that my emails were going directly to junk mail courtesy of the spam filter. An editor should be aware of this possibility and check all spam/junk mail prior to deleting. Only today I checked my junk mail to find an email notifying me that a new manuscript had been submitted via the electronic submission system. I really don't think it was a reasonable response from the publishers office, and perhaps the author should ask to have the publications manager responsible for the particular journal contact the author regarding the non-communication of the editor.

Toni McCallum Pardey
Interim Editor-in-Chief, AENJ
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Thank you and the other friends for all the valuable comments. I really wanted to believe that the problem could be with the Internet or other physical problems. But, unfortunately I think the editor's or the office's behavior is far from medical ethics. My friend received an email from the office manager three days ago announcing that they accepted the case report, BUT for another journal! And to publish in the second journal my friend should pay 50 Euro per page. This proves that there was no problem with the Internet and all we assumed about such problems were wrong.

Again there is another problem here, my friend wanted to publish his article in the journal to which he submitted his article. Although he can refuse the suggestion for publication, I think the editor could have transferred the reviewers' comments much earlier and asked my friend if he wanted his article be reviewed for another journal.

My friend wrote another letter to the manager to ask if the suggested journal was indexed inMedline or if there was any phone number for the office, but he has not received any reply after three days. And I am pretty sure that he will not receive such reply again.

I myself believe that business and academic approaches have been mixed in processing his case report.

Behrooz Astaneh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences
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