Changes and Constants

Editor's Notes

• #3 This landscape, for all of us in research and research publishing, is one through which we must travel. The question for COPE becomes how does COPE act, and change, to stay true to its mission in publication ethics, and to continue to help the communities and members we serve? For example, what do we think and do about preprints? What do practices like versioning, code sharing, and data sharing mean for the relatively static “version of record” that journals create for researchers? How do stresses and strains on researchers, whether as authors or as peer reviewers, play out and what do we do about the consequences? What new opportunities do we need to embrace? Three things feel like relative constants for COPE. Each is a part of our mission, and each is baked into COPE’s mindset. We deliver resources that support, inform and educate on publication ethics. We lead thinking and advance understanding in publication ethics. We bring a calm, neutral, and professional voice to current debates about publication ethics. So we’ll use these “constants” as we travel this landscape. For our “P” we’ll respond to references to COPE made in the Plan S guidance on implementation with our neutral and professional voice. For our “E” we’ll recognise the new preprint practices that an increasing number of research communities are adopting by completing our guidance on preprints (started in our preprint discussion document). By doing that we’ll promote recognition of more than peer reviewed journal articles as potential research outputs, and perhaps relieve some of the pressure to publish that researchers face. We’ll address concerns about “predatory” practices, building on the discussions we already started at COPE Forum, and leading to presentation at the Sixth World Conference on Research Integrity in June 2019. For our “S” we’ll continue to encourage operational transparency from our members, working with organisations like OASPA, DOAJ, and WAME and with campaigns like Think.Check.Submit. And for our “T” we’ll keep an eye on how technology developments enable open research and open science and what this means for new resources from COPE so we continue support integrity and ethics in research publishing. We’ll keep on moving.
• #4 Landscape Image: Free for commercial use No attribution required Publication ethics is part of research and research publishing. So here’s a quick look at four of the political, economic, societal, and technological forces shaping our world, in the form of a much abbreviated PEST analysis. It makes a point about change. We’ll use this as a start for this letter. Our political “P” can be Plan S from Coalition S. This coalition of now sixteen national, European, and international research funders plus the European Commission and the European Research Council has the political power to set policy and wield influence, and aims to make full and immediate open access a reality by 2020. Coalition S shared policy ideas back in September 2018 and on November 27th added thoughts about Plan S implementation. While we were writing this Letter, Nature reported that librarians and funders in China voiced support. For “E” and our economic forces, let’s take trends in global research spend. OECD countries spent over USD1trillion on research first in 2010, and continued to increase that budget since. Every year, researchers need to publish and communicate more work. This pressure creates new opportunities and new challenges. For our societal “S” let’s go with the public dialogue about what being an expert means, allied with our concerns about reproducibility. We’re becoming more aware of what reproducibility requires of research, researchers, and research publishing, and about what it is reasonable to expect. Last, for “T” and technology, let’s choose the promise and expectation from diverse parties that we can (and so we should) answer research questions and solve the world’s problems faster by using new collaboration tools, computing power, and vast amounts of open data. This technology proposition is at the heart of the open research and open science movement
• #5 “This case was a major eye-opener for us, as it was the first time we’d ever heard about reviewers setting up dummy email accounts to review their own papers. I think people were jaw-dropped at this; it didn’t even occur to me that it could happen. It represented a turning point for a lot of people about how much journal publishing has changed in the digital era.” CP: I’d say definitely case number #12-12 – meaning, it was the 12th case we handled in 2012. In this case, a journal had discovered that an author had created fake email accounts for reviewers, and asked us how to handle the other papers published by the same author, in which the author did not admit to fabricating reviews. We suggested: The Forum advised re-reviewing the remaining published papers to which author A has not admitted influencing the peer review process. If the journal wishes to stand by these papers, then it is essential that all of the papers are re-reviewed. In the meantime, an expression of concern should be issued for all of these papers. One suggestion was to inform the author of the course of action that the journal is going to undertake and see if he wishes to retract all of these papers. The Forum noted that the journal should take some responsibility for failure of their peer review system. Good practice is always to check the names, addresses and email contacts of reviewers, and especially those that are recommended by authors. Editors should never use only the preferred reviewer. This case was a major eye-opener for us, as it was the first time we’d ever heard about reviewers setting up dummy email accounts to review their own papers. I think people were jaw-dropped at this; it didn’t even occur to me that it could happen. It represented a turning point for a lot of people about how much journal publishing has changed in the digital era.
• #6 This landscape, for all of us in research and research publishing, is one through which we must travel. The question for COPE becomes how does COPE act, and change, to stay true to its mission in publication ethics, and to continue to help the communities and members we serve? For example, what do we think and do about preprints? What do practices like versioning, code sharing, and data sharing mean for the relatively static “version of record” that journals create for researchers? How do stresses and strains on researchers, whether as authors or as peer reviewers, play out and what do we do about the consequences? What new opportunities do we need to embrace? Three things feel like relative constants for COPE. Each is a part of our mission, and each is baked into COPE’s mindset. We deliver resources that support, inform and educate on publication ethics. We lead thinking and advance understanding in publication ethics. We bring a calm, neutral, and professional voice to current debates about publication ethics. So we’ll use these “constants” as we travel this landscape. For our “P” we’ll respond to references to COPE made in the Plan S guidance on implementation with our neutral and professional voice. For our “E” we’ll recognise the new preprint practices that an increasing number of research communities are adopting by completing our guidance on preprints (started in our preprint discussion document). By doing that we’ll promote recognition of more than peer reviewed journal articles as potential research outputs, and perhaps relieve some of the pressure to publish that researchers face. We’ll address concerns about “predatory” practices, building on the discussions we already started at COPE Forum, and leading to presentation at the Sixth World Conference on Research Integrity in June 2019. For our “S” we’ll continue to encourage operational transparency from our members, working with organisations like OASPA, DOAJ, and WAME and with campaigns like Think.Check.Submit. And for our “T” we’ll keep an eye on how technology developments enable open research and open science and what this means for new resources from COPE so we continue support integrity and ethics in research publishing. We’ll keep on moving.
• #7 In spite of the continual pressure to become a tribunal of sorts with an imprimatur for adjudicating and judging publishers and journals, COPE remains an organization with the primary purpose of providing education about publication ethics. The importance of education is not to be trivialized in a global context where strong voices claim false equivalency for all opinion as equal contenders with the truth. In such a context, COPE reaffirms the importance of sharing knowledge and advice regarding the complex nature of navigating ethics in publications as a knowledgeable honest broker in an ethically contested environment.
• #8 Reflection image: Image credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0-migrated Jerry Segraves-jerrysfoto.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue-reflect.jpg We offer reflections on what we’ve learned, what we think is true now, and what we think will remain true as COPE grows. We’ve used words, of course, but also we’ve shared evidence of the actions COPE has taken to make those words come alive. These are the lessons we’ve learned.
• #10 We’ve loved working with the elected and co-opted volunteers who give their expertise and time as the 31 members of COPE Council. We have equally loved working with the small and awesome team of staff at COPE. Council members (and COPE’s membership in general) are the people who inspire and lead the work of COPE, and for everyone’s work we’re extremely grateful. Sometimes it is a challenge to find consensus among such diverse groups of people. Where there is no consensus we’re happy to report the differences. Such is the complexity of the publishing ethics world. Preprints, for example, can be divisive. People in some disciplines happily and comfortably embrace preprinting. For others, the risks of preprints are real and outweigh the benefits. Either way, the world still needs guidance on things like preprints from COPE, and we can benefit from exploring the very real differences of opinion (by the way, our Preprints Discussion Document is being revised and will be out soon). Journal teams are another place where we champion diversity. Working with people from across cultures is what we need to address new and complex problems in publishing ethics and research integrity. Like we say above, it’s all always about people. 
• #11 We’ve loved working with the elected and co-opted volunteers who give their expertise and time as the 31 members of COPE Council. We have equally loved working with the small and awesome team of staff at COPE. Council members (and COPE’s membership in general) are the people who inspire and lead the work of COPE, and for everyone’s work we’re extremely grateful. Sometimes it is a challenge to find consensus among such diverse groups of people. Where there is no consensus we’re happy to report the differences. Such is the complexity of the publishing ethics world. Preprints, for example, can be divisive. People in some disciplines happily and comfortably embrace preprinting. For others, the risks of preprints are real and outweigh the benefits. Either way, the world still needs guidance on things like preprints from COPE, and we can benefit from exploring the very real differences of opinion (by the way, our Preprints Discussion Document is being revised and will be out soon). Journal teams are another place where we champion diversity. Working with people from across cultures is what we need to address new and complex problems in publishing ethics and research integrity. Like we say above, it’s all always about people. 
• #12 “We need a culture of responsibility for the integrity of the literature… it’s not just the job of editors” said our previous COPE Chair Ginny Barbour in 2015. All the stakeholders we meet care about research and publication ethics, and they are always more than happy to share their unique perspectives. Bringing these people together to promote integrity and ethics in research publishing will be an increasingly important job for COPE. We need more collaborations between editors themselves, when the situation demands, and also with stakeholders at universities, we need to work effectively with people around the world, and we need insights from people within disciplines that are historically less well-travelled by COPE. If the work of COPE is always about people, then we need to extend our circle of friends so that we can effectively promote integrity of the literature, and help people solve their complex publication ethics problems.
• #13 “We need a culture of responsibility for the integrity of the literature… it’s not just the job of editors.” These are words, often repeated, from previous COPE Chair Ginny Barbour back in 2015. Around the same time COPE asked its members what we should do more of. One of the prominent requests was “Please, COPE, help researchers.” Our traditional members – journal editors and journal publishers – were asking COPE to reach outside its traditional membership, and to change. We’ve responded to this request. In January of 2017 we were delighted to welcome the first members of our pilot with universities and research institutions. University of Ottawa and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Caltech, Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Hong Kong joined us in 2017. Ohio State University joined early in 2018. And since then the generous and professional people representing these organisations have made valuable contributions to (and we hope benefited from) many COPE activities. They have joined us in COPE Forums online to discuss cases and topical issues. They’ve attended COPE Seminars in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia. We’ve worked together on new versions of guidelines like the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers now part of our Peer Review Processes Core Practice. We’ve started a needs assessment together at multiple sites, to find out what research integrity teams at universities and institutes need to address, by asking researchers. We’ve published insights on data and reproducibility, the preprint discussions mentioned above, and new infographics to help recognise potential authorship problems. This year we’ve been invited to speak at and attend events like the Ohio State University Research Integrity Summit, the Association of Research Integrity Officers (ARIO) annual conference, the German Research Ombudsman (Ombudsman für die Wissenschaft) symposium about good scientific practice, and the annual conference of the UK Research Integrity Office. These events in particular were fantastic places for COPE people to listen to what people from universities and research institutions think about publishing ethics. So we thank the organisers warmly.
• #14 Research was supported by Routledge / T&F. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) aims to provide practical publication ethics guidance for editors working in all disciplines. We wanted to better understand the publication ethics issues faced by arts, humanities, and social sciences journal editors and, with support from Routledge, carried out this research to assess current and future needs. The results will help us provide better support and guidance to journal editors working in these disciplines. The research was conducted in two stages: 1. We held two initial, exploratory focus groups to identify current ethical issues editors face, future issues they anticipate, and what sources of support they currently use or need. 2. This informed an online survey of a larger number of editors, which helped us understand the prevalence of these issues, how frequently editors are encountering them, and which challenges they need most support with. We gathered insights from 656 editors of journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who responded to the online survey. This included voluntary and employed editors working independently or in teams, and with varied levels of experience.
• #15 We were not surprised to learn that committed people from research intensive universities and research institutes recognise the same problems that traditional COPE members recognise (traditional COPE members being journal editors and publishers). We’ve learned what we need to do to promote integrity and ethics in research publishing most effectively. We have to stop imagining that acting alone is going to be helpful. We have to start imagining how we can work together, and then collaborate. Allegations of misconduct, for example, benefit from a shared approach, something that Jo, a fictional research integrity officer at an equally fictional public university is finding out as her story unfolds. COPE will continue to focus on the people who care about research integrity and publishing ethics, and we will extend our circle to be as inclusive as we can (while maintaining the standards we hold dear). COPE will enable and support these people to act together to make a positive difference in publishing ethics and research integrity, and to respond to the need for change.
• #16 All that diversity, growth, and collaboration is going to create more complexity for us all, and we have to be honest with ourselves that COPE is a small organisation (albeit a mighty one). Making our shared ambitions a reality has always been a stretch, and that stretch increases with more complexity. We have to take one step at a time and proceed in an orderly fashion. Fortunately, we are guided and can measure our steps by listening to our members and the communities worldwide that we serve. Aspiring to better practice in publication ethics and research integrity means promoting respect for and between researchers, authors, peer reviewers, journal editors, and research administrators; it means supporting their best efforts to respect research participants, subjects, animals, and the environment; it means promoting respect amongst all stakeholders for the people who benefit from well-conducted and well-communicated research: Us all. This is a whole lot of listening for COPE to do.