COPE’s Core Practices are ten expectation categories — covering misconduct allegations, authorship, complaints, and conflicts of interest, among others — that the Committee on Publication Ethics has required of member journals and publishers since 2017. COPE is a voluntary, fee-based membership body, not a regulator, so following the Core Practices is a membership condition rather than a legal requirement. Update: COPE has since retired the Core Practices and replaced them with a Code of Conduct, allowing a 12-month transition period before strict adherence becomes a condition of membership.
What COPE is, briefly
COPE was founded in 1997 by a small group of UK medical journal editors and has grown into an international membership organization with roughly 13,000 member journals and publishers across disciplines. Membership is voluntary and fee-based. In exchange, COPE provides standards guidance, case-by-case advice through its Forum, and educational resources; in return, members commit to following COPE’s expected practices and to using COPE’s complaint procedure if a concern is raised about how they’ve handled a case. COPE does not publish journals, review manuscripts, or adjudicate individual disputes — its role is to set expectations and provide guidance, not to act as a court.
Core Practices: what COPE expects of member journals and publishers
Since 2017, COPE has organized its expectations of members around ten Core Practice areas. These are the categories every COPE-member journal or publisher is expected to have a documented policy or process for, and they’re also the framework most third-party summaries of “COPE guidelines” are actually describing, whether or not they say so explicitly:
- Allegations of misconduct — a clearly described process for handling allegations, however they’re raised, including who investigates and what happens while an allegation is pending.
- Authorship and contributorship — a stated policy for who qualifies as an author or contributor, and a process for resolving disputes over authorship or author order. See CASRAI’s guide to resolving authorship order disputes.
- Complaints and appeals — a documented process for handling complaints against the journal itself, its staff, editorial board, or publisher, separate from complaints about a specific paper.
- Conflicts of interest — definitions and processes for handling conflicts of interest for authors, reviewers, and editors, identified either before or after publication. See CASRAI’s guide on conflict of interest disclosure in scholarly publication.
- Data and reproducibility — policies on data availability and encouraging (or requiring) reporting guidelines and study registration appropriate to the discipline.
- Ethical oversight — policies covering informed consent, treatment of vulnerable populations, and research ethics approval where a study involves human or animal subjects.
- Intellectual property — how the journal or publisher handles copyright, licensing, and IP disputes arising from published or submitted work.
- Journal management — sound editorial governance: how the journal is run, how editorial decisions are made independent of commercial interests, and succession planning for editorial leadership.
- Peer review processes — the review model used, training and support for reviewers, and safeguards against manipulated or fraudulent review. See CASRAI’s peer review model comparison.
- Post-publication discussions and corrections — a mechanism for the scholarly record to be debated and corrected after publication, whether through letters to the editor, an external moderated platform, or the journal’s own commenting system. See CASRAI’s guide to post-publication peer review, from concern to correction.
Each of these areas maps onto more detailed COPE guidance documents, flowcharts, and case discussions — the Core Practices are the table of contents, not the full text.
A framework in transition: what “Core Practices” means right now
One thing generic explainers of “COPE guidelines” tend to gloss over: the Core Practices framework has itself changed status recently. COPE’s own account of its history (published on publicationethics.org) traces the lineage as Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (1999) → Code of Conduct for Editors (2004) → Core Practices, which replaced the Code of Conduct in 2017 as a simplified framework linking out to detailed guidance. COPE has since stated that the Core Practices were retired in 2024, with a new Code of Conduct for members intended to replace them — publicationethics.org lists a 2026 publication target for that Code of Conduct, though COPE itself has noted the release date has been revised while supporting work is completed.
In practice, this means the ten categories above remain the operative reference point for what COPE-aligned journals and publishers are expected to cover — they’re still how COPE’s own guidance library, most publisher ethics pages, and most third-party commentary organize the subject — but they are formally in a transitional status rather than a currently-published, unchanged standard. Anyone citing “COPE’s Core Practices” as an active document should note this transition and check publicationethics.org/membership/code-of-conduct for the current state before treating the ten-category framework as final.
Guidance, not law: how COPE’s standing actually works
COPE is a membership and standards body, not a regulator, a court, or a government agency. Nothing in COPE’s guidance is independently enforceable against a journal, a publisher, an author, or an institution — there is no statute that requires compliance, and COPE has no power to compel a retraction, overturn an authorship dispute, or sanction a researcher. What COPE guidance actually does is:
- Set the expectations that member journals and publishers agree to when they join, backed by COPE’s own complaint and (per its published membership-review process) periodic assessment of members.
- Provide a common reference that non-members also widely adopt by choice — many publishers write COPE’s flowcharts and guidelines directly into their own internal editorial policies, which is the main reason COPE’s influence extends well beyond its formal membership.
- Function as persuasive, citable authority in disputes — a journal that follows a documented COPE process has a stronger position than one that improvises, even though neither is legally required to follow COPE.
This is the same distinction that applies to bodies like ICMJE: authoritative, widely adopted, and frequently cited in journal policy — but voluntary guidance, not law. A journal’s actual, binding obligations come from its own published policies, its publisher’s contracts, applicable national law (for example, research-ethics or data-protection statutes), and any funder or institutional requirements that apply to the underlying research — COPE guidance informs those policies without replacing them.
COPE’s guidance library, mapped
“COPE guidelines” in casual usage usually refers to one or more of the following, distinct documents:
- Core Practices — the ten-category framework above; see the section on its current transitional status.
- Flowcharts — scenario-specific decision trees for suspected plagiarism, duplicate submission, authorship disputes, image manipulation, and more. Not covered again here — see CASRAI’s dedicated COPE flowcharts guide for how these actually work.
- Retraction Guidelines — a standalone policy document on when and how a retraction should be issued (version 2, published November 2019, DOI 10.24318/cope.2019.1.4). Retraction Watch reported in September 2025 that COPE issued a further update expanding the guidance to address paper-mill fraud, crediting third parties (including outside sleuths) who identify problems, batch retractions from coordinated manipulation, and tighter expectations around not delaying a retraction indefinitely for a stalled investigation. See CASRAI’s own guide to how a retraction actually happens for the editorial process this guidance feeds into, and the retraction dictionary entry for the operational definition.
- Discussion document: authorship — published September 2019, addressing harder authorship scenarios (disputes across institutions or countries, author-order negotiation, third-party medical writers, threatened legal action). See CASRAI’s guide to resolving authorship order disputes and the authorship dispute dictionary entry.
- Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers — sets out reviewer responsibilities: declaring competing interests, timeliness, confidentiality, and having sufficient expertise to review fairly (version 2, published September 2017).
- Ethics toolkit for a successful editorial office — practical, checklist-style guidance for editorial offices on setting up the processes the Core Practices assume exist (complaint handling, conflict-of-interest declarations, and so on), published as both a downloadable PDF and a set of web pages.
- Position statement: Authorship and AI tools — published February 13, 2023. States that AI tools do not meet the criteria for authorship (they cannot take responsibility for a submitted work or manage conflicts of interest, copyright, or licensing as a non-legal entity) and that authors who use generative AI in preparing a manuscript, in producing images or graphical elements, or in collecting or analyzing data must disclose which tool was used and how, in the Methods section or equivalent. See CASRAI’s generative-AI disclosure statement dictionary entry and the dedicated guide can AI be listed as an author?
- Case database — COPE’s quarterly Forum lets members bring real, anonymized cases for discussion; every Forum case since 1997 is entered into a searchable database along with the advice given and any follow-up, making it COPE’s largest single body of applied (rather than abstract) guidance.
- Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing — a joint document with DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME (version 4, 2022) that forms part of the membership criteria for all four organizations. This is a distinct, jointly-authored document rather than COPE-only guidance — see CASRAI’s Principles of Transparency dictionary entry rather than a redefinition here.
All of these are maintained directly by COPE at publicationethics.org, which is the authoritative, current source for the full text and any updates — this guide summarizes the shape of the library, not every clause of every document.
What’s new: AI disclosure and the relaunched paper mills working group
Two threads of COPE’s guidance are actively moving as of 2026, on top of the Core Practices transition above. First, COPE has joined the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation, the International Science Council, STM (the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers), and the Global Young Academy in a joint initiative toward a Global Reporting Standard for AI Disclosure in Research — informally referred to as the “Vancouver Standard” after its role as a focus track of the World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver (May 3–6, 2026). The project runs a staged consultation through 2026 (an initial round mapping disclosure needs and format ran December 2025–February 2026, with a further round on what should be disclosed running July–September 2026) and is intended to sit alongside, not replace, COPE’s existing February 2023 position statement on authorship and AI tools — see CASRAI’s guide to journal and publisher AI policies for how individual publishers currently implement disclosure in practice.
Second, COPE relaunched its paper mills working group in June 2026. In its own framing, paper mills “have not disappeared, they have evolved”, and as “coordinated misconduct and exploitation of AI reshape the threat”, the relaunched group is intended to provide collaborative support to editors and publishers facing it — alongside COPE’s continued participation in United2Act, the multi-stakeholder paper-mill initiative it runs jointly with STM. This sits on top of, not instead of, the Retraction Guidelines update on paper-mill fraud described above. See CASRAI’s paper mills and tortured phrases guide and the paper mill dictionary entry for how these patterns are actually identified. Note that COPE’s own image-manipulation flowchart (version 2, published May 20, 2024) is a procedural tool for editors deciding how to respond to a concern — corrections, expressions of concern, or retraction — rather than a technical or forensic methodology for detecting duplicated, spliced, or enhanced images; that kind of screening is increasingly performed with AI-assisted detection tools used by publishers and integrity teams, but those tools sit outside COPE’s own guidance documents.
Related CASRAI guidance
Several CASRAI guides and dictionary entries apply this guidance to specific research-administration scenarios: how a research misconduct investigation actually works (the institutional process COPE’s allegations-of-misconduct practice hands off to), how to identify predatory journals and publishers (journals that claim COPE affiliation or ethics compliance without genuine adherence), can AI be listed as an author? (ICMJE, COPE, and publisher positions), and journal and publisher policies on generative AI in manuscripts. For the cluster this guide sits in, see the Research Integrity & Compliance pillar page.
Frequently asked questions
Is following COPE’s guidelines legally required?
No. COPE is a voluntary membership and standards body, not a regulator or a court. Nothing in its guidance is independently enforceable — a journal’s binding obligations come from its own policies, its publisher’s contracts, applicable law, and any funder or institutional requirements, not from COPE directly. COPE guidance is widely adopted by choice, including by many non-member journals, because it’s authoritative and well-tested, not because it’s compulsory.
Do I need to be a COPE member to use COPE’s guidance?
No. COPE’s flowcharts, guideline documents, and case database are published openly on publicationethics.org at no cost. Membership adds direct access to COPE’s case-consultation Forum, eligibility to be listed as a COPE member, and (per COPE’s published criteria) participation in its membership review process — but reading and applying the published guidance itself doesn’t require membership.
What’s the difference between COPE’s Core Practices and its flowcharts?
Core Practices is the higher-level framework: the ten categories of expectation COPE sets for member journals and publishers across the full publication lifecycle. Flowcharts are the operational layer underneath — scenario-specific decision aids for applying those expectations to one concrete situation, such as a specific plagiarism allegation or authorship dispute. See CASRAI’s COPE flowcharts guide for how the flowcharts themselves work.
How is COPE different from ICMJE?
Both are voluntary, non-regulatory bodies that publish widely-adopted publishing-ethics guidance, but they differ in scope and origin. COPE is a cross-disciplinary membership organization covering the full range of academic publishing ethics (misconduct, peer review, authorship, retraction, and more) across roughly 13,000 member journals. ICMJE is a smaller committee of biomedical journal editors best known for its authorship criteria and its Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. Many biomedical journals reference both.
Are COPE’s Core Practices still current?
They’re in transition. COPE states the Core Practices, introduced in 2017, were retired in 2024, with a new Code of Conduct for members intended to replace them — publicationethics.org has listed a 2026 target for that Code of Conduct, though COPE has noted the release date has been revised. Until the new Code of Conduct is published, the ten Core Practice categories remain the reference framework most guidance, including COPE’s own flowcharts and toolkits, is organized around. Check publicationethics.org/membership/code-of-conduct directly for the current status before treating either document as final.
Does COPE require authors to disclose AI tool use?
COPE’s February 2023 position statement, Authorship and AI tools, states that AI tools cannot be listed as authors and that authors who use generative AI in writing, in producing images or graphical elements, or in collecting or analyzing data must disclose which tool was used and how, typically in the Methods section or equivalent. Separately, COPE is one of several organizations (alongside the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation, the International Science Council, STM, and the Global Young Academy) working through a staged 2025–2026 consultation toward a more standardized Global Reporting Standard for AI Disclosure in Research; that standard is still in development, not yet finalized.
Is COPE doing anything new about AI-enabled paper mills?
Yes. COPE relaunched its paper mills working group in June 2026 specifically to address how coordinated misconduct has evolved alongside generative AI, in addition to its existing participation in the multi-stakeholder United2Act initiative and its 2025 update to the Retraction Guidelines addressing paper-mill fraud. See CASRAI’s paper mills and tortured phrases guide for how to recognize the red flags this guidance targets.
