You are here

COPE in 2023

A time to review and look forward

In 2022, COPE celebrated its 25th year. While we celebrated this anniversary with pride in all that we have achieved over the past 25 years, we also took the opportunity to reflect on COPE’s role and purpose in a rapidly evolving research and publication landscape. The scrutiny of how publishers and journals work and what they publish has never been higher—both within our own professional circles and in the wider academic and non-academic communities. At COPE, we take very seriously our role in promoting integrity in research publishing, and in supporting our members (and others) so they are able to respond to old and new ethical challenges. As we met at our first in-person meeting of the Trustees, Council and staff in October 2022 – the first in three years owing to the Covid-19 pandemic – to discuss how COPE should respond to developments in existing publication integrity issues, as well as newer challenges facing the community such as paper mills and artificial intelligence (AI), we also discussed the need to continue to reflect on and evaluate COPE’s role in addressing these challenges; and the policies and processes we need to implement to support them.

One criticism regularly levelled at COPE is that we have ‘no teeth’. To be clear, COPE is not a regulatory body. COPE was not created for this purpose and we do not have the legal framework to be a regulatory body. As a membership organisation that is run by volunteers this cannot be what we do at COPE. Rather, our aim is educational and aimed at providing guidance and advice – not only to our members but, indirectly, to the wider community. Our goal is to raise standards and awareness of best practice via collaborative dialogue, providing an objective space for important conversations to be aired, leading to the creation of publicly available resources. The 1999 Guidelines on Good Publication Practice note in the opening paragraph that “COPE is a voluntary body providing a discussion forum and advice for scientific editors, it aims to find practical ways of dealing with the issues, and to develop good practice”. At its core, this is what COPE remains today as the principles espoused in the guidelines continue to form the basis of current COPE guidance: “....guidelines [that] are intended to be advisory rather than prescriptive, and to evolve over time”.

While COPE’s principal remit is to provide support and education for our members to help them publish research in the most ethical and rigorous way possible, COPE membership also comes with expectations. Expectations from within COPE itself – for example, we expect that members will work with COPE to address issues raised against their journal via our established Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee – and expectations from the wider research community who rightly expect that if journal is a member of COPE that they will follow COPE best practice standards. It is clear from external discussions that have taken place about COPE’s role that we need to make these expectations clearer and review existing policies and processes to ensure that they remain relevant to today’s needs. Accordingly, one such area that we will review in 2023 is the remit of the Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee to ensure it is still fit for purpose in today's landscape.

COPE recognises and acknowledges the tension that exists between COPE, as a membership organisation that provides guidance and advice to raise standards in publication ethics, and its perceived role as an organisation that ‘sets the standards’ that members must abide by. COPE has an extremely rigorous membership assessment process – based partly on the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing – to ensure that all journals, publishers or individuals accepted for membership meet the standards that we expect. Nonetheless, during 2023, we have committed to undertaking an extensive review and evaluation of this process, including: how we assess membership applications; how we on-board new members; and how we can better support members to ensure they are following ethical practices after they have been accepted. In a constantly evolving publishing landscape, being a member of COPE requires active work to ensure that the best ethical practices are always being upheld and we will evaluate how best we can support members, and potential members, to publish ethically, ensuring the research community can trust in that process.

There is a clear need for national or global agencies with regulatory powers to mandate adherence to research and publication ethical standards, but COPE is not such an agency. We strongly welcome the formation of such a body. Without it, maintaining the integrity of the literature remains a joint endeavour that requires trust and collaboration between researchers, journals, publishers, research institutions, funders and governments which may be at cross-purposes. We will continue to collaborate with individuals and organisations across the ecosystem to try and improve the way that misconduct is detected and dealt with so that the research record can be protected and trusted. We believe that only by working together can we raise awareness of these issues, promote high standards of ethical behaviour, and attempt to produce guidance and advice that supports changes in behaviour, policies and processes to promote publication integrity. We will work throughout 2023 and beyond to develop and foster these collaborations in a way that leads to true change.

Finally, this year, our current strategic plan comes to an end. At our in-person meeting later this year, the Trustees and Council will hold a full day strategy meeting where the strategic priorities for 2024-2026 will be determined. We will be surveying not only our members but also others with an interest in publication ethics, to receive your input into what you think COPE’s priorities should be for the next three years. Planning for a new strategic plan is always an exciting time and we are very interested to hear what area(s) you think COPE should be focusing on during this time of rapid evolution in research publishing.

Dan Kulp, COPE Chair

Nancy Chesheir COPE Vice-Chair

Natalie Ridgeway, COPE Executive Officer

-----------

The definition of regulatory from the Cambridge Business English Dictionary © Cambridge University Press is “an official organisation that is responsible for checking whether a business is working legally and according to rules or laws” (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/regulatory).

Back to top

COPE Digest newsletter

Read COPE Digest newsletter January 2023, in which we share a Nature article on unearned authorship and offer guidance to editors on how to spot and deal with this issue. COPE's Ethics Toolkit is updated to align with changes made to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. COPE speakers will be at various events in the coming weeks, and we invite COPE Members to join us for a Forum discussion on artificial intelligence and writing.