Dear Readers,
We begin this issue with a warm welcome to our new Council Members. They are: Sarah Eaton, Kim Eggleton, Paul Graham Fisher, Stephanie Kinnan and Siri Lunde Strømme. They individually and collectively bring diverse strengths and interdisciplinary expertise to COPE’s Council. Welcome on board!
As we move into the second month of 2021, COPE has reconfigured our many services to meet our membership deliverables through the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of 2020, we reviewed the year’s activities in terms of our strategic goals and a synopsis of those activities is included in this month’s Digest. In particular, while we hope to have face to face meetings at the end of 2021, we have committed to online delivery of increased interactive events, including workshops, webinars and a virtual seminar. We also plan to discuss emerging areas of publication ethics at our quarterly forums. Please review our strategic report summary to see the work we are providing and hope to provide in the year ahead to facilitate the goals and needs of our members.
As we mentioned in our January letter, we are collaborating with FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group to address the need for guidelines and resources that support authors, data curators and editors in handling research data sharing. In this issue of Digest, Iratxe Puebla, co-leader of the FORCE11 Working Group, and Matt Hodgkinson, COPE Council representative, give some background on COPE’s work on data sharing and describe the goals of the working group and how people can get involved.
COPE has contracted with Cambridge University Press (CUP) to develop our first online learning resource for universities and research institutes. This product will be an online course on publication ethics, targeted to the needs of research integrity officers (or equivalent). More on this to follow.
On 10 February, we delivered an online authorship cases workshop. This workshop will be repeated for different time zones on 24 February at 17.00-18.30pm (AWST)/9.00-10.30am (GMT).
The topic of the COPE Forum on 23 March is book publishing. COPE has established a working group with member organizations to address ethical issues around book publishing, particularly with respect to monographs and anthologies. At a later stage, the committee intends to address the more complex topic of conference proceedings.
COPE Chair Deborah Poff, CM,PhD
Read February 2021 Digest: data sharing resources, upcoming authorship cases workshop, a strategic report from COPE on 2020 activities, and our regular news and events roundup.