COPE Discussion Documents

COPE discussion documents

When aspects of publication ethics are particularly fast-moving or controversial COPE cannot always provide detailed guidance. The COPE discussion documents are a new venture for COPE (launched May 2011) and aim to stimulate discussion rather than tell editors what to do. We hope that, by raising the issues, we can contribute to the debate within the academic publishing community and work towards agreement or definition of difficult problems.

We encourage you to comment on the documents. We are happy to receive comments from anybody with an interest in the area (whether they are COPE members or not). In particular, we would like to hear from researchers and authors as well as from editors and publishers. We cannot respond to individual cases but we will use any comments we receive to inform future guidelines and policies.

The first discussion document asks ‘How should editors respond to plagiarism?’.  Future documents are planned to address ‘What constitutes publication?’, ‘Dealing with whistleblowers’, and ‘Data sharing’.

In the second document, 'Institutional responses to editors' concerns about scientific misconduct', COPE Chair, Liz Wager, has used COPE cases to illustrate the problems that editors may face when they try to contact authors' institutions about suspicions of misconduct or other ethical concerns. We hope this will draw attention to these problems and be a first step towards working to resolve them. COPE is hoping to work with a number of major institutions worldwide to discuss the problems and develop guidelines on this. The original article can be found on the BMJ website here and is reproduced here with permission. We encourage COPE members (and others) to comment on the article via the BMJ website (as a Rapid Response) and to circulate the link to contacts at institutions concerned with research governance who might be interested.

In 'Research misconduct in the UK: time to act', COPE Chair, Liz Wager, and BMJ editor in chief, Fiona Godlee, discuss the lack of systems in place to investigate research misconduct in the UK. This editorial is published in conjunction with a high-level meeting on research misconduct, organised by the BMJ and COPE, with speakers from several countries presenting.  The editorial is available to BMJ subscribers here, and, with permission of the BMJ, on the COPE website here.  Additionally, the editorial references a linked Feature arricle which discusses the issues in more depth.  'Managing research misconduct: is anyone getting it right?' by Aniket Tavare is also available via a toll-free link granted to us by the BMJ.  Click here to access the article.

'A consensus statement on research misconduct in the UK' has been produced by the attendees at the joint BMJ/COPE meeting and is available here.

Please email comments to the COPE Operations Manager here.