COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)

COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) is a UK-founded international membership organisation, established in 1997 by a group of medical journal editors, that now spans essentially all research disciplines. Membership is open to journals and publishers (not to individual editors acting alone), and COPE reports roughly 13,000 member journals and publishers as of the mid-2020s. COPE does not peer-review, audit, or certify the quality of a member’s published output — membership signals that a journal has agreed to follow COPE’s published ethics framework and can draw on COPE’s guidance and case-advice service when a problem arises.

Core Practices

COPE’s current organising framework is the Core Practices, published in 2017 as a simplified replacement for the earlier Code of Conduct (1999 Guidelines on Good Publication Practice → 2004 Code of Conduct → 2011 separate editor/publisher codes → 2017 Core Practices). The ten categories are: allegations of misconduct; authorship and contributorship; complaints and appeals; conflicts of interest; data and reproducibility; ethical oversight; intellectual property issues; journal management; peer review processes and training; and post-publication discussion and corrections.

The Core Practices were formally retired in 2024. COPE has been developing a successor Code of Conduct for Members, originally targeted for 2026, though COPE has itself indicated the release date has been revised while supporting work continues — as of this writing there is no confirmed evidence the new Code of Conduct has shipped. In practice, the ten Core Practice categories remain the reference point editors, flowcharts, and COPE’s own guidance library are still organised around.

Flowcharts

COPE’s flowcharts are short, scenario-specific decision trees that walk an editor through a defined ethics problem step by step — each one poses a series of yes/no questions and routes the editor toward a recommended action (for example: correct the record, issue an expression of concern, request an investigation, or retract). They are procedural/editorial decision tools, not forensic or technical methodologies — the image-manipulation flowchart, for instance, helps an editor decide what to do once a concern about a figure has been raised; it does not itself detect manipulated images.

Widely used flowcharts include “What to do if you suspect redundant (duplicate) publication,” the “Changes in authorship” family covering requests to add, remove, or reorder authors at different manuscript stages, “Ghost, guest, or gift authorship in a submitted manuscript,” and “Inappropriate image manipulation in a published article” (now version 2, published May 2024). New and updated flowcharts are added as new problem patterns emerge — COPE’s guidance on recognising peer review manipulation was itself updated in 2025.

Retraction and misconduct guidance

COPE’s Retraction Guidelines (version 2, published November 2019) set out when a retraction is warranted and how it should be handled and communicated. In 2025, COPE extended this guidance specifically to address paper-mill-driven fraud — covering how to credit third-party sleuths who identify problems, how to handle batch retractions from a coordinated fraud pattern while giving potentially innocent co-authors a chance for re-review, and discouraging indefinitely delaying a retraction while an institutional investigation stalls. COPE relaunched its paper mills working group in June 2026 and continues to participate in United2Act, the joint publisher/integrity-officer/sleuth response coalition COPE runs together with STM. Separately, COPE’s largest applied body of guidance is its Forum case database: quarterly member case-discussion meetings, running continuously since 1997, in which real (anonymised) cases and the advice given are logged and searchable.

Membership requirements

A journal or publisher becomes a COPE member by applying, agreeing to adhere to the Core Practices, and paying the membership fee (tiered by publisher size). Membership does not require pre-clearance of editorial decisions and is not itself a quality mark — it is a commitment to a published ethics framework, access to the case-advice service and Forum, and (for members in breach) exposure to COPE’s own limited escalation options, which include a public statement of concern about the member or removal from the membership list. COPE has no regulatory authority to compel a correction, retraction, or institutional sanction.

How COPE relates to ICMJE, WAME, and CSE

COPE, ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors), WAME (World Association of Medical Editors), and CSE (Council of Science Editors) are frequently confused because they overlap in subject matter, but they are structurally different bodies:

• COPE is a cross-disciplinary membership organisation for journals/publishers, focused on process and case-by-case ethics advice (what to do when a problem is reported), not on authorship or manuscript-preparation standards themselves.
• ICMJE is a small, self-selected working group of medical journal editors that publishes the “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals” — de facto standards for authorship criteria, conflicts of interest, and clinical trial registration in medicine specifically. It has no membership structure and no case-advice function.
• WAME is a nonprofit professional association of medical journal editors (founded 1995) that publishes consensus policy statements on editorial ethics — authorship, peer review, conflicts of interest, corrections — aimed at the same medical-editing community ICMJE and COPE serve, but organised as an editor-membership society rather than a small working group or a publisher-membership body.
• CSE (Council of Science Editors, renamed from the Council of Biology Editors in 2000) is a professional society for science editors across disciplines. Its “White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications” (first published 2006, updated on a rolling basis since 2018) plays a role similar to COPE’s Core Practices, but for a broader scientific-editing membership rather than COPE’s publisher-membership model.

COPE, WAME, DOAJ, and OASPA (not CSE or ICMJE) jointly author the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, the clearest example of these bodies’ guidance converging into a single shared document.

References

• COPE Core Practices (2017) and history of the Code of Conduct and Core Practices, publicationethics.org
• COPE Flowcharts library (ongoing), publicationethics.org
• COPE Retraction Guidelines v2 (November 2019), DOI 10.24318/cope.2019.1.4
• COPE & STM, “Paper Mills: Research Report” (2022); United2Act consensus statement (2023)
• ICMJE, “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals,” icmje.org
• WAME policy statements, wame.org
• CSE’s White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications, csescienceeditor.org