Publisher Taylor & Francis Group (T&F), LLC, US, has announced a partnership with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), under which all T&F journals will be supported by COPE. The committee works with scientific journal editors to help them improve their skills and the quality of their publications. Until now it has been run by a volunteer committee of editors and those involved in scholarly publishing. Now it plans to recruit a full time director.
COPE is a forum for editors of peer-reviewed journals to discuss issues related to the integrity of the scientific record. It supports and encourages editors to report, catalogue and initiate investigations into ethical problems in the publication process, and is currently engaged in a major expansion programme.
Publication ethics has been attracting increased attention from several quarters. Specialists in science ethics, Barbara Redman and Jon Merz, recently examined the records of scientists who were officially found guilty of misconduct by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) between January 1994 and December 2001. Earlier this month, COPE, along with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), conducted a one day workshop on Ethical Publishing - a guide for biomedical journal publishers & editors. The workshop provided a 'how to..' guide to ethical publishing. Speakers highlighted the key ethical issues that biological, biomedical and clinical journals should consider.
COPE's other initiatives include an enhanced partnership with Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The partnership covers over 1,300 journals, the full collection of STM and scholarly journals published by Wiley-Blackwell. Earlier, in February 2008, STM publisher Elsevier announced a partnership with COPE for its more than 2000 journals and the full collection of Health Sciences and Science & Technology journals.
