The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established over 20 years ago. COPE educates and supports editors and publishers, aiming to bring about a culture of ethical publishing, which becomes the norm within scientific publishing.
History of COPE?
COPE’s history can be traced back to April 1997, when it was founded by Mike Farthing, Richard Smith and Richard Horton. By 2003 COPE had 90 members.
In 2003 Fiona Godlee became the Chair of COPE. Godlee was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious BMJ in 2005, a position she still holds at the time of writing (23 Mar 2021).
By 2006, COPE’s membership had risen to 350, which is the same year it became a charity and Harvey Marcovitch took over as the Chair.
By 2009, the membership had risen to over 3,000. This significant rise, we suspect, is due to the fact that some publishers now signed up all of the journals in their portfolios.
COPE also started producing flowcharts for various workflows. This is something that they still do today and this link shows you all the flowcharts they they currently produce.
As examples, there are flowcharts for “What to do if you suspect plagiarism” (see Figure 1) and “What to do if you suspect fabricated data“, along with many others.
Liz Wager took over as COPE Chair in 2009 and between 2009 and 2012 COPE held its first USA, Australian and Middle East seminar, as well as delivering its first eLearning course. To this day, COPE still has eLearning courses available, which are available to its registered members.
During this period, COPE also released their first retraction guidelines and released their publishers code of conduct. They also employed their first member of staff and published their first newsletter.
Between 2012 and 2017 Ginny Barbour was COPE’s Chair. COPE held their first South American seminar and the first European seminar outside of London. Guidelines of cooperation between research institutions and journals were released, as well as a Code of Conduct, best practices for journal editors and ethical guidelines for peer reviewers.
COPE issued the “COPE Digest: Publication Ethics in Practice“, a newsletter that has been published since 2013.
Between 2017 and 2019 COPE had Co-Chairs (Chris Graf and Geri Pearson). As well as producing, and updating many guidelines and processes, COPE held its first China seminar, produced its first infographic and celebrated its 20th anniversary.
In 2019, Deborah Poff took over as Chair and developed a new strategic plan which included universities being accepted as members. The COPE web site now contains more than 600 cases and DOI’s are assigned to all key COPE resources.
At this time, COPE has more than 12,500 members from 2013 countries.
Deborah Poff’s term as Chair will end in May 2021, when Daniel Kulp will take over.
The information about the history of COPE is largely drawn from their infographic which can be seen here. This page also contains a lot more descriptive information.
Resources available from COPE
COPE provides a number of resources to the general public (by which we mean those who are not members of COPE). COPE has three types of resources available.
Flowcharts
The COPE web site states
“The flowcharts are designed to help editors follow COPE’s Core Practices and implement its advice when faced with cases of suspected misconduct and have been translated into a number of different languages. They can be downloaded individually (English only) or as a complete set.“
At the time of writing COPE had 36 flowcharts available. They can be accessed here.
Guidelines
COPE (at the time of writing) has 12 guideline documents available.
The guidelines cover topics such as “A short guide to ethical editing for new editors” and “Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers“.
Cases
The cases section of the COPE web site is by far the largest of the three types of resources that are available.
If you navigate to this area of the web site, you will find (at the time of writing) that 623 cases are available. Looking at the numbering scheme, it appears that the cases go all the way back to 1997.
These cases are very interesting just to browse through. Doing so provides many insights, even to experienced scholars.
COPE members can submit new cases, where they are seeking advice.
Becoming a member of COPE
Different entities can apply to become a member of COPE, these being (taken from their web site):
- Editors of peer-reviewed academic journals;
- Companies that publish peer-reviewed academic journals; and
- Individuals or companies who are interested in publication ethics and are working in or associated with the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly journals may become an individual or corporate member. Journal editors or publishers are not eligible for individual or corporate membership.
When you apply, you will be assessed against a set of criteria before your membership application is accepted.
Checking for membership of COPE
Anybody is able to check if a journal or publisher is a member of COPE simply by using the search box at the top of their home page. You can type in the name of a journal (either by name or ISSN) or a publisher.
Figure 5 shows an example when we search for the publisher “Taylor and Francis”.
Using our tool
We have developed a tool that enables you to check if a journal is a member of COPE, a member of DOAJ and whether the journal’s ISSN number is recognized. You can do this yourself by going to the individual web sites but the tool we have developed enables you to check these three things at the same time.
An example of the output from our tool is shown in Figure 6 and full details how to use it are available in our article “Check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE or DOAJ“.
Closing remarks
From a predatory publishing point of view, establishing whether a given journal or publisher is a member of COPE is a strong indication that the journal/publisher is legitimate. You may want to carry out additional checks but being a member of COPE should give you a strong steer that the journal you are dealing with is not predatory.
One word of caution, if a journal is not a member of COPE, it does not necessarily mean that the journal is predatory. The journal/publisher may have just decided, for good reasons, that they do not wish to become a member of COPE.