Publication practices and journal access is a highly evolving area at the moment. Here are some of the topics, and highlights. This is far from exhaustive, so feel free to add to these in the forums.

Overall issues that may arise are covered by
The American Chemical Society's 5 episodes of Publishing Your Research 101.

HOW TO DETERMINE CONTRIBUTIONS:

There is a Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), "a forum for editors and publishers of peer-reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication ethics".

In May 2012, there was an International Workshop on Contributorship and Authorship Attribution.

"There is growing interest among researchers, funding agencies, academic institutions, editors, and publishers in increasing the transparency of research contributions, and in more granular tracking of attribution and associated credit. Many publishers now require contribution disclosures upon article submission - some in structured form, some in free-text form - at the same time that funders are developing more scientifically rigorous ways to track the outputs and impact of their research investments.

Our objectives as a group will be to explore the pros and cons of alternative approaches, and to converge on a roadmap toward the creation of contributorship and attribution models and technologies ..."


GUIDELINES on PUBLICATIONS:

Each journal has its publication guidelines, for example

Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors

also the details on The Editorial Policy and Practices of the Standard Reasearch Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences are interesting to read.


PNAS's editorial policies can be found here.


For example, Science has quite explicitly defined the guidelines both for authors and reviewers. Standards for reporting can be very explicit, such as in the open access journal BMC Biology.
Systematic reviews in medicine, such as those compiled in a closed access (subscription required) Cochrane Database, can help gain insights across by summarizing and interpreting the results of medical research. How to write such reviews are summarized in the Cochrane Handbook.
The Office of Research Integrity in the US Department of Health and Human Services has a Policy on Plagiarism.

REVIEWER PROCESS:

In addition to reviewing manuscripts for publication, as scientists, we have an opportunity to review others' grants.
The NIH (USA) Grant application submission and review process is clarified with a series of videos on their website.

Peer Review at Science
this page also includes Additional Resources for the Peer Review Process
 
Some journals are starting to publish both reviewer names and the reviews themselves. PloSone,

The issues are discussed here "I Hate Your Paper" from The Scientist
For example, arXiv, an open access archive of pre-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics, is not peer-reviewed, although moderated.
We now have another model of peer review, which uses a "Peer Review Service" - by paying, the authors can have their manuscript reviewed in a shorter timeline.

RETRACTIONS:

Finally, when there are issues with publications, some are retracted. Retraction Watch, a blog, keeps track of retracted papers. The number of retractions have been increasing every year, especially in high impact factor journals. For a glossary, see here.
After the STAP Cell retractions (see reading folder in the Misconduct Section), this blog analyzes how the peer review went wrong. This is the Retraction Watch's article on the peer review of this case.
Last modified: Monday, 19 October 2015, 3:44 PM