The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was begun in 1997 by a small group of UK-based medical journal editors as a sort of "self-help" group to deal with ethical issues they were dealing with at the time. Optimistically, in 1997 Richard Smith, then the editor of the BMJ wrote:

From that original group of fewer than 10 people, COPE has grown to over 14,000 members, including editors, publishers, universities and research institutes, organizations related to academic publishing, and individuals working in publication and research ethics. COPE is a UK-based charity that is domain-agnostic, representing scholarly publishing across all disciplines, from the arts, humanities and social sciences, maths to law, through to science, technology, engineering and medicine.

Explore COPE's origins and evolution

As stated in the 2025-2028 strategic plan, the purpose of COPE is "To educate and advance knowledge in methods of safeguarding the integrity of the scholarly record for the benefit of the public" and we do this via our primary mission "to provide expert guidance to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record" through collaborations with others, support and education, and leadership and expertise.

Like Richard Smith's statement, we continue to have the aspirational goal of "A future in which ethical practice in scholarly research and its publication is the norm." Unfortunately, this future seems very far away.

Threats to ethical scholarly publishing have intensified with the shift to a predominantly digital publishing ecosystem. Those seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in this system, primarily for financial gain but also for academic reputation, have become increasingly clever and sophisticated.

Many organizations work to reduce these vulnerabilities, establish and educate relevant parties about best practices in ethical publishing, and stay ahead of the "bad guys," and COPE collaborates with many of them.

Through the years, COPE has developed and revised best practices for editors and publishers to follow to increase their ethical standards. We have produced advice for reviewers and authors as well. There are several different types of guidance documents we produce.

It's important to understand how COPE accomplishes what we do. There is a small but mighty staff and volunteers from the general membership who apply for a position on the COPE Council, the workhorse unit of COPE, and the COPE Trustee Board, which is ultimately responsible for COPE's work. Our COPE Council members are appointed for 3 years, with an option to apply to be re-appointed for another 3 years. The video on the side shows interviews of COPE Council members discussing why they wanted to join the group. Hopefully, some of this readership will be inspired to apply.

Read more about membership

All of these are available to anyone on the COPE website, supporting our purpose of serving the public. Members can also participate in our quarterly COPE Forums, where we discuss a topical publication ethics issue in depth. We then explore cases of dilemmas our members face, seeking input from the Forum participants on possible solutions. COPE webinars, seminars, some external talks and video presentations from our annual online Publication Integrity Week presentations are posted on our YouTube channel. This year's COPE Publication Integrity week is November 17-21.

Website   ·   YouTube channel

There are multiple Council subcommittees, and members work on 2-3 of these. Priorities for guidance development are set by the Strategy and Research and the Education subcommittees. Writing groups representing various perspectives develop the guidance, which is then approved (or not) by vote of the Education Subcommittee, then the Council and the Trustee Board. As you can imagine, a group including a lot of editors and publishers can have a lot to say about publication ethics issues, but this ends up with guidance documents that are comprehensive and well-written. Even so, COPE considers these as "living documents" that are reviewed regularly and updated or rewritten as required.

The COPE Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee addresses cases brought to them from people who want assistance in resolving an issue with a member journal or publisher. The committee facilitates communication between the parties to achieve a resolution. The Membership Standards and Assessment committee reviews applications from publishers, journals, organizations and corporations, and individuals and follows a rigorous, multi-stage review process to evaluate applicants applying for membership. Recently, we published new guidance to support potential members in understanding COPE expectations and requirements for journal membership following a thorough review of the assessment process.

Read published guidance

There are multiple organizations that are working to improve the integrity of scholarly publishing and we collaborate with many of them. The task is too great for one group of people to succeed. We are committed to providing expert and well-informed direction and vision to members of the research and publishing communities and collaborating with others in this effort. The list of documents we have released or reviewed and reaffirmed in 2025 provides a glimpse of issues we address.

Positions:

• Editorial independence

• Banned terms in scholarly publications and restrictions on researchers’ activities

• COPE statement on external influence on editorial decisions

Guidelines:

• Revised Retraction Guidelines*

• Expressions of Concern*

• Author fees and waivers

• Guest edited collections

Flowcharts:

• Reviewer suspected to have appropriated an author’s ideas or data

• How to recognize potential manipulation of the peer review process

*Release date early September, 2025