I hope that everyone had the opportunity to read the April Digest letter from Geri and Chris, our steadfast COPE co-chairs for the past three years. They have provided leadership with integrity, with hard work and kept a very busy schedule of activities on behalf of COPE. And all on a voluntary basis. Chris and Geri will continue their roles as past Co-Chairs for the coming year. We also thank Charon Pierson, COPE Secretary, who has been a dedicated member of the Officers and Trustee Board, and has now finished her term and will be stepping down from COPE. We welcome Dan Kulp as the new Vice-Chair, Tara Hoke as COPE Secretary and Michael Wise as our new Treasurer. Collectively, we will work hard to meet the needs of our community.
It has been a busy beginning to my term as Chair. There was a Summit in April at the University of Ottawa on predatory publishing. We have also been working on a discussion document on predatory publishing which should be available shortly. A number of members of COPE Council are busy planning for four presentations in June at the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) in Hong Kong. We hope to see many of you there.
COPE held a session with our publisher members in Philadelphia in May, followed the next day by our North American Seminar. The theme of the seminar was diversity and inclusion, focused specifically on the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS). Serving our members across these disciplines well has been a part of our strategic plan over the past three years. Preliminary data from our recent survey with members from the AHSS community were presented at the seminar. Stay tuned for the release of COPE’s more detailed white paper from this survey.
We were very pleased to present a COPE introduction session at the African Journals Participation Program meetings in Columbus, followed by presentations by Heather Tierney and me at the recent Council of Science Editors meeting.
We will be at the ISMTE conference at the beginning of August in Durham and I look forward to seeing some of you there.
Mark your calendars for September 23, 2019 for our COPE European seminar in Leiden, the Netherlands. We will announce the focus of the seminar in our next Digest newsletter. This will be followed by a meeting of our Council and Board who will be developing our strategic plan for the next three years, which we will be happy to share with you.
Warm regards til next month,
COPE Chair Deborah Poff
Read May 2019 Digest newsletter for a discussion on a case of "Suspected Plagiarism", answers to questions taken at our Allegations of Misconduct webinar, and updated guidance "Ethical Editing For New Editors". We have the key findings from our research to further understand the issues faced by editors in the arts, humanities and social science which is in an easy to browse format. Charon Pierson reflects on our North American seminar "Issues of inclusivity and diversity in scholarly publishing in the arts humanities, and social sciences", with links to key resources and presentations from the speakers. Plus the monthly news and events roundup.