The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a charity registered in the UK. It is concerned with the integrity of peer-reviewed publications. It was established in 1997 but now has over 5200 members worldwide. Membership is open to editors of academic journals but other individuals who are interested in publication ethics may become associate members. Several major publishers (including Elsevier, Wiley–Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan and Wolters Kluwer) have signed up their journals as COPE members.
COPE provides a forum for editors of academic journals to discuss issues relating to the integrity of the work submitted to, or published in, their journals. Examples include conflicts of interest, falsification and fabrication of data, plagiarism, unethical experimentation, redundant publication and authorship disputes. COPE encourages its members to seek investigation into possible misconduct by universities, hospitals or other funders.
The COPE Forum, open to all members, meets quarterly to discuss anonymised cases and posts its advice on this website, where summaries of all cases can be found, most with the resulting outcome. Flowcharts on how to handle the more common publication misconduct problems are accessible to all on the website. COPE’s governing Council, also meets quarterly. COPE has an independent Ombudsman to adjudicate disputes between COPE members or between them and the organisation. It also publishes a Code of Conduct for Editors who are members of the organisation and will investigate complaints against them. It is currently developing a Code of Conduct for publishers.
COPE also funds research on issues relating to publication misconduct, publishes a quarterly newsletter and its officers lecture widely on the subject, making their presentations available to members. COPE organises annual seminars in the UK and the USA. COPE is committed to improving Editors' abilities to deal with publication misconduct and is developing an online distance-learning course. COPE has also provided its members with an auditing tool for their journals to measure compliance with its Best Practice Guidelines.
COPE supports the UK Panel for Research Integrity (UKRIO) and the World Conferences on Research Integrity (Lisbon, 2007, Singapore 2010). It also has links with the Council of Science Editors, the European Association of Science Editors, the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors and the World Association of Medical Editors. You can read more about COPE's history here.