• promotes integrity in scholarly research and its publication
• leadership in thinking on publication ethics and practical resources to educate and support members, and offers a professional voice in current debates.

COPE drafted a discussion paper on predatory publishing in 2019, and the dialogue has turned to more practice based solutions.

What are the next steps that COPE, or other industry organisations, might consider as a response to the continued flourishing and growth of predatory journals, conferences, and publishers?

Questions for COPE Forum

• Should COPE use its criteria for membership as an instrument to evaluate standards of scholarly publishing vehicles for the purpose of informing authors, peer reviewers, readers, scholars invited to serve on editorial boards, and universities evaluating scholarly productivity?
• Should COPE and/or other industry organisations form a global compact of signatories to commit to the practice of research and publication integrity and further to the active marginalisation of predatory publishing within the scholarly communities of universities, editors, and publishers?
• Should COPE and/or other industry organisations act as a third party retraction service for authors who have unknowingly published with a predatory publisher which will neither withdraw nor retract the articles at the request of the authors?

This will be discussed at the start of the Forum with guest speaker Dr Kelly Cobey who will describe the Authenticator Project, being developed by the Centre for Journalology, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, University of Ottawa, Canada.

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