- Event
ISMPP European Meeting 2018: COPE member discount
ISMPP will hold its 2018 European Meeting, Advancing Medical Publications in a Complex Evidence Ecosystem, on 23-24 January, in London, and is offering a 10% discount on the registration fee to COPE members. Access the registration page at, and enter EU18COPE10 in the “Discount Code” field. The 10% discount is available… - Event
ISMPP European Meeting 2019
ISMPP is offering a 10% registration discount to COPE members for its 2019 European Meeting, Scientific Communications in a Fast-Paced World: Fighting Fit for the Future, 22-23 January, in London, UK. Learn more about the meeting at www.ismpp.org/european-meeting, and enter EU19COPE10 in the “Discount Code” field when you… - News
Vacancies on COPE Council 2021
…Volunteer with COPE CLOSING DATE FRIDAY 23 JULY 2021 We are seeking applications from members of COPE interested in serving on COPE Council. We currently have six vacancies owing to the early retirement of one Council Member, two Council Members completing their first term on Council who are… - News
WCRI 2019: Predatory publishing plenary
…articles, many subscription journals also charge authors fees, and hijacked journals can present as subscription journals. Tweets about the session can be seen at - Event
COPE European Seminar 2019
COPE's 2019 European Seminar will be held in Leiden, Netherlands on 23 September 2019. More details on the programme can be found here. The venue… - Case
Publication bias arising from an editor’s activities
The committee’s attention has been drawn to alleged publication bias in Journal X. It is alleged that an editor on X had invited a young trainee in radiology to author some 14 commentaries over the past 5 years. His most recent commentary draws attention to one important study from France but otherwise covers the same territory as his previous commentaries without mention of relevant contrary… FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…="http://www.publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf">http://www.publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf This will be discussed at the start of the next COPE Forum on Tuesday 23 September. Please do leave any comments below, whether or not you are planning on joining the meeting…- News
Mediterranean Editors and Translators Meeting 2018
COPE council member Iria del Río shares her experience of the #METM18 conference where she was a keynote speaker, workshop presenter and attendee on the blog - Case
WAME case
All agreed that waiting 18 months for a decision on a manuscript was wholly unacceptable, especially as no acknowledgement was sent. The Forum acknowledged that finding suitable reviewers can be a problem, particularly in specialist areas. But even in these situations, the author should be contacted within 2–3 months and kept updated on the situation. If it is a very specialist area,… - Case
Balancing Anonymisation and Open Science during peer-review process
As an editor of a journal with a double-anonymous peer review system, I often wonder about the right balance between open science practices and anonymisation of the manuscript for the review process. How much anonymisation is enough while being compatible with open science dissemination? In particular, when a manuscript includes information about the protocol registration and raw data, s… - Case
Lack of acknowledgement of contributor
…involving about 23 lines of duplication. While this represents a small percentage (about 4%) of the total number of lines in the paper, because they duplicated lines from some version of the A/C paper, the editor believes there was a moral obligation on A and the new author (B) to acknowledge the earlier paper and/or the collaborative efforts of C. However, A claims that (1) s/he wrote all of the… Strategic plan
…publication as they arise. Revenue We will have expanded our membership and established more sources of revenue to sustain our mission beyond 2023. Read the full details of COPE's strategic plan 2020-2023 (PDF, 3.16 MB) An update on work towards COPE's strategic plan:- Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around book publishing
…Nature and Tim Wakeford of Ubiquity Press who have shared discussion points, comparisons, and cases to initiate this discussion. This topic was discussed at the start of the COPE Forum on Tuesday 23 March 2021, with guest speakers Tamara Welschot and Jennifer Wright. Back to top Comments from the Forum, March 2021 Note, comments do not imply… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: August 2019
…href="https://publicationethics.org/cope-european-seminar-2019">European Seminar which will be held on the 23rd of September in Leiden, the Netherlands. The seminar will focus on a number of current issues that editors and publishers are dealing with and should be of interest to many of our members. Please see a description of the sessions for the day. We look forward to seeing many of our… - Case
Scientifically meaningless research without consent
A private practitioner submitted a paper in which he had treated a series of patients without ethics committee approval. Many people would regard the treatment used as scientifically dubious. Furthermore, some of the patients had been treated with increasing doses of a new treatment that randomised controlled trials have shown to work. In effect, therefore, the study was a dosage study of the n… - Case
Duplicate publication
A reader contacted the editorial staff of Journal A after noticing that Journal B, which is primarily non-English, had published a paper that was remarkably similar. The editor of journal A contacted the editor of Journal B. Both editors reviewed the two papers and agreed that the paper from Journal B contained methods, results, and conclusions that formed a part of the paper from Journal… - Case
Late addition of new author to article
Journal A was contacted by the sole author of an article that had been peer reviewed and accepted requesting the addition of a second author. The original author claimed that he had forgotten to include the co-author earlier. The journal is concerned about the risk that the new author has not done any work on the article and might get undue credit if their name was added. Questions f… - Case
Concerns over the withdrawal of a complaint
The journal received multiple complaints from two ‘whistleblowers’ in country A regarding the methodology presented in an article published in 2021. The Editors began an investigation into the paper, using evidence provided by the whistleblowers. The Editors felt that based on the provided evidence, an investigation should be carried out. The authors, who were also from country A, were made awa… - Case
Handling undisclosed peer reviewer conflict
Some authors from a company recommended a peer reviewer on submitting their manuscript, who was then asked to review the manuscript. This reviewer recommended acceptance without change. One other reviewer recommended major revision (a methodological reviewer not a content expert) and the third reviewer recommended rejection. The editor found it unusual for a review to recommend acceptance witho… - News
Vacancies on COPE Council
…least 1 year. COPE Council is an active, working council. Council meets three times a year; two of the meetings are held by webinar, with the other being a 2–3 day residential meeting incorporating subcommittee meetings and a strategy day. Every other year there is an additional, in person, residential meeting. It is expected that all COPE Council members will attend all of these meetings.…