The UK needs an independent agency to monitor standards in publication ethics and prevent the growing problem of research misconduct. This is one of the principal recommendations of The COPE Report 1998, published this week by the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Since its inception in April 1997, the committee has received a steady stream of examples of research fraud, data fabrications, plagiarism, and redundant publication. A substantial number of these are published in the report as anonymised case studies. There are no official data on the scale of the problem, but the report suggests that only a comparatively small …