Scroll to the bottom of almost any journal's about page and you will find a sentence claiming it follows COPE. Few authors know what that sentence commits the journal to — which is a shame, because COPE guidance is one of the most useful things an author can understand. It sets out what a well-run journal owes you when something goes wrong, and it gives you the vocabulary to ask for it.
What COPE is
The Committee on Publication Ethics is an international, non-profit body that advises journals, publishers and institutions on publication ethics. It does not police journals or adjudicate individual disputes. It does two things exceptionally well: it defines what good practice looks like, and it publishes detailed flowcharts for handling specific problems — suspected plagiarism, authorship disputes, undisclosed conflicts, image manipulation, and more.
The ten Core Practices
COPE's Core Practices replaced its older codes of conduct. In plain terms, a journal is expected to have clear, published policies and processes for:
- Allegations of misconduct — how concerns are received and investigated.
- Authorship and contributorship — who qualifies, and how disputes are handled.
- Complaints and appeals — a route to challenge a decision.
- Conflicts of interest — declaration and management, for authors, reviewers and editors.
- Data and reproducibility — expectations for sharing and verifying.
- Ethical oversight — consent, vulnerable populations, research on humans and animals.
- Intellectual property — copyright, licensing and plagiarism.
- Journal management — a well-described infrastructure, editorial board and policies.
- Peer review processes — described transparently, and applied consistently.
- Post-publication discussions and corrections — a mechanism to debate and correct the record.
What this means for you in practice
Read that list again as a checklist you can apply to any journal before submitting. Each Core Practice should correspond to a page you can actually find on the journal's site. A journal that claims to follow COPE but publishes no complaints procedure, no correction policy and no description of its peer review has told you something useful.
A quick test: can you find, in under two minutes, the journal's policy on corrections, on authorship, and on conflicts of interest? If not, the COPE claim is decoration.
Using COPE when something goes wrong
If you discover an error in your published paper, suspect your work has been plagiarised, or face an authorship problem, the sequence is: contact the journal first, in writing, with evidence; escalate to the publisher if the journal does not respond; and involve the relevant institution where research conduct is in question. COPE's flowcharts are public — reading the relevant one first tells you exactly what steps the journal should be taking, which makes your correspondence far more effective.
Directive Publications aligns its editorial policies with COPE's Core Practices, and our publication ethics and corrections pages set out how we handle these situations.