Every serious indexing application — DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, PMC — reads your ethics and policy pages before it reads your articles. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) core practices are the de facto standard those reviewers have in mind, and your journal starts with the pages needed to meet them.
Your seeded policy pages
Every journal on Scholardemia is created with About, Editorial Board, Author Guidelines, Peer Review, and Journal Statements pages already in place. They are starting points: edit them in the page builder so they state your journal’s actual practice. An unedited template page is easy for a reviewer to spot, and reads worse than a short honest policy.
Mapping to COPE core practices
Work through the COPE core practices and make sure each has a home on your pages:
- Peer review process — who reviews, how many reviewers, anonymity model.
- Authorship and contributorship criteria, and how disputes are handled.
- Conflicts of interest — declarations from authors, reviewers, and editors.
- Allegations of misconduct, and complaints and appeals procedures.
- Data availability and ethical oversight for studies that need it.
- Intellectual property: the article licence (most journals here choose CC BY) and who holds copyright.
- Post-publication corrections and retractions — Scholardemia’s versioning keeps corrected and retracted articles transparently linked to their history.
Joining COPE itself
COPE membership is a separate application made once a journal has an operating record, and it carries a membership fee paid by the publisher — as with everything on Scholardemia, costs never fall on authors. At launch, alignment matters far more than membership: indexers ask whether you follow the practices, not whether you hold the badge.