In October, the Trustee Board, Council Members, and staff of COPE met in person for the first time since 2019 for a strategic and tactical discussion about current challenges in the field of publication ethics and research integrity; an evaluation of COPE’s role in addressing these challenges; and the policies and processes we need to implement to support them. It is likely that you have experienced the energy amongst your work groups generated by a return to in-person meetings, and this was no exception. In this report, I will summarise the key discussions which we hope you will consider. In 2023 we will be conducting a member survey before we start to consider our new strategic plan for 2024 onwards, and we hope that you will keep this in mind when submitting your responses. We will also be seeking the views of non-members and the wider publication ethics community.
A major theme that underpinned many of our discussions was “what is COPE’s role in the landscape of publication and research ethics?”. COPE is an educational body that provides advice and guidance on current and emerging threats to publication ethics. It is clear, however, that development and dissemination of this guidance is neither efficient nor effective enough. Important issues to address to improve this include:
- What do COPE members and the wider community need?
- What value do existing and potential members want to gain from COPE?
- Why do some journals choose not to join COPE?
- How do we engage with journal editors and staff who are members under their publisher?
- How should we share our guidance and other resources?
- Are the Digest and Member Insight monthly newsletters useful? Are there better ways to format them, amplify their reach and make them more informative?
- What is the role of social media as a tool for dissemination? Which platforms for our worldwide membership would be most effective?
- Can we better target information to members and readers’ requirements?
- How can we be more responsive to emerging and established issues? Developing thoughtful, measured, and useful guidance and other resources requires time to fully understand the issues and their underlying ethical issues and appropriate responses. Our Council Members and Trustees are volunteers who work diligently to develop these promptly, but we don’t always meet the goal of nimble responsiveness.
- Consider a brief statement to quickly address emerging issues.
- Improve the triage of which issues require more considered guidance documents.
- Improve the process for writing these documents.
- How can we more fully engage members, and others, in the work COPE does?
Additionally, we need to make the application process for membership to COPE more efficient to reduce the time to decision while maintaining our current thorough and robust assessment. There is tension in this process that seeks members who support and operationalise COPE guidance while also preventing journals and publishers that seem to desire membership to legitimise their organisation when they have no intention of adopting COPE guidance. We are considering:
- Streamlining the application process.
- A pre-application step to identify major issues that an applicant could correct before a final application.
- Introducing either a pre-acceptance or provisional membership status for those journals that have not been approved by the Membership subcommittee for not meeting all of the membership criteria, offering guidance and mentorship to support them in developing best practices in publication ethics.
- Making membership criteria transparent and mapping the application process to these criteria.
- It is worth noting here that we currently reject approximately 80% of all applications which do not meet our strict assessment criteria, many from countries outside of the UK, Europe and North America. We feel strongly that this is not supportive of COPE’s objective to improve diversity and how to better support journals from these regions in attaining best practice is one of the considerations.
We discussed whether the role and remit of the Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee should change in any way and how to make it clear what the expectations should be by both the presenter of the concern and the journal or publisher that the concern is raised against. The Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee’s role is not to adjudicate or investigate complaints, but instead to facilitate the resolution of disputes in a manner that is consistent with COPE's mission to educate. COPE is not a statutory or regulatory body and cannot ‘force’ a member to take a particular course of action. COPE does have a sanctions process but this would only be instigated as a last resort in responding to egregious behaviour by members, and only after failed remediation attempts. NOTE: as COPE’s mission is to educate publishers and editors about publication ethics, removal of a member means that COPE no longer has any leverage or impact on that member’s behaviour. We agreed that we need to provide more clarity about the remit, processes, and scope of F&I and this is under further discussion.
We also discussed how we could further incorporate the views of others working in publication ethics and research integrity, particularly those critical towards COPE. A major societal concern is that people and organisations increasingly operate within an echo chamber. We believe it is important to hear and learn from those who challenge COPE
We are energised about finding solutions to problems facing members, those who aspire to be members and working with other organisations with the goal of preserving publication and research integrity. Our goal and challenge now, hopefully with your input, is to nimbly operationalise the right solutions.
All the best for 2023.
Nancy Chescheir, COPE Vice-Chair