This week is COPE’s Publication Integrity Week 2025, with five days of online events and activities to highlight issues around publishing integrity. It is COPE’s (the Committee on Publication Ethics) attempt to ensure it addresses current concerns in the scholarly communications community, and each day focuses on a different theme. This year, COPE has identified issues such as DEIA, institutional responsibility, and technological change as just some of the issues to focus on.
It is inevitably a difficult time for organizations like COPE – full disclosure, I was a Trustee of COPE from 2020-2023 – with such fast-paced changes to technology and geopolitics making the ground constantly move under the publishing industry’s feet. It is clear that the aims and scope of a body like COPE are a valuable part of the industry in ensuring it works efficiently and equitably for everyone, but not everyone agrees that these overall outcomes are being achieved.
Snide remarks
Some of the criticism of COPE and even individuals within the organization can be heard at conferences and industry events, where conversations drift towards exasperation at the lack of perceived impact the body has, and even sharp comments toward the people who volunteer their time and efforts to work for them. Often, these comments come from people who have little or no experience working on integrity issues, let alone in a voluntary organization like COPE, and as such should be challenged: why aren’t these people raising their concerns more publicly?
Some of course do, most notably For Better Science blogger Leonid Schneider. Not known for pulling his punches – indeed, his acerbic take on publishing misdeeds has generated a notoriety unrivalled in scholarly communications – his blog celebrated its 10th anniversary recently with a host of anarchic and brutal contributions from the community of sleuths and commentators he has supported over the years.
Policing without police
Over the last decade, Schneider’s blog has tackled head-on difficult issues such as predatory publishing, paper mills, corruption, fraud, and other major breaches of research and publishing integrity. Like many commentators, his strength is in speaking truth to power, and being above any hint of moral weakness – unlike many of those he identifies quite clearly in his writings. Inevitably, some object to the spotlight he shines directly at them, including many good actors such as COPE.
In the past, Schneider’s blog has called COPE the “publisher’s Trojan horse,” criticising the make-up of the organization, which is largely funded by its publisher membership. However, in recent weeks, it has drawn attention to the work various sleuths have done in identifying apparent integrity breaches in published articles, only for publishers of the journals where these articles appeared to cite COPE guidelines, either to say no breaches were identified, or to defend themselves by saying they are COPE members.
You cannot blame COPE for publishers seeming to hide behind its guidelines when dealing with integrity issues, and I know for sure they are as frustrated as anyone at the length of time it takes for some articles to be retracted (something that has also been highlighted by another site celebrating an anniversary, the 15-year old RetractionWatch). A recent post in For Better Science proposed the ‘Fribourg Declaration,’ stating that perceived ills such as COPE, predatory journals, paper mills, and Impact Factors would be cured by getting rid of journals altogether and giving funders the responsibility of publishing results they have paid for. This has not worked out when it has been tried in the past, and also ignores the real culprit behind so many of these problems: the law. Fear of culpability, libel, legal processes, exorbitant costs, and corporate liability all fuel anxiety, procrastination, and delays in tackling integrity issues, and it does so in darkness where no one knows what, if anything, is going on. As long as such an environment persists, neither COPE, For Better Science nor any other stakeholder in scholarly publishing will be satisfied with how things are.
