Springer Nature and its journals are members of COPE (the Committee On Publication Ethics). COPE’s primary mission is educational; it is an advisory body, not a regulator. There are more than 12,500 COPE members from 103 countries. Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Director, Suzanne Farley, is a member of COPE’s Board of Trustees. Our Research Integrity Group works closely with COPE to help them develop new educational resources
COPE membership helps differentiate legitimate journals from the increasing number of predatory and poor-quality outlets. It is one of the indicators of quality used by important third parties such as Clarivate Analytics (for Journal Impact Factor) and indexers (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed). Maintaining COPE membership depends on adhering to the best-practice standards that they set.
In addition to the COPE Core Practices, there are flowcharts and Guidelines which help Editors solve common editorial problems. COPE also supports book editors with issues related to publication ethics.