The Correlates of War Project (named the Correlates of War 2 project from 2001 through 2004) has moved to institutionalize the loosely structured organization of the original project based at the University of Michigan, while also maintaining the involvement of many collaborators at widely dispersed locations. The governance structures of the project are as follows.

Director
The Correlates of War project is headed by a director charged with overseeing and coordinating the main activities of the project. This includes tracking the status of the project's data sets, convening meetings, setting data gathering priorities and directions, helping to resolve coding disputes, and coordinating with other data collection and management efforts as appropriate. The current director is Paul Diehl (with a term starting in January 2005). From 1998 through 2002, the director was Stuart Bremer. From 2002-2004, Scott Bennett served as Interim Director, with Glenn Palmer as Associate Director.

Associate Director
The associate director is responsible for the maintenance of the data archive and the more technical aspects of the project. This includes maintaining and managing the web site, posting data sets, and overseeing the format of data sets and associated documentation. The COW data archive is currently maintained at the Pennsylvania State University. The current associate director is Scott Bennett.

Advisory Board
The Correlates of War project is overseen by an advisory board. The board is composed of 5 voting members, plus the associate director. The director of the project will consult with the advisory board on important matters and as the director deems necessary. Final decisions about matters such as data set hosts and procedures, the adoption of new coding rules or restructuring of typologies and datasets, and the addition of new data as officially-designated COW data sets will rest with the advisory board.

Advisory Board Membership
Normally, one member of the advisory board will rotate off the board each year. After rotating off the board, former advisors may not join the board for the next 2 years. New members of the board will be nominated through members of the board, and selected by majority vote of the board. Board Member procedures and term dates were updated at the February, 2010 board meeting.

Current board members and the end dates of their terms are as follows:
April 2011: Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, University of Iowa
April 2012: Andrew Enterline, University of North Texas
April 2013: Phil Schrodt, Pennsylvania State University
April 2014: Meredith Sarkees, Women & Politics Institute, American University
April 2015: Patrick Regan, Binghamton University

Meetings
The advisory board will meet whenever the director deems necessary, typically at at least one professional meeting per academic year. In addition, the project hopes to plan an open meeting of scholars interested in the ongoing COW enterprise at least once each academic year, at a professional conference such as the fall APSA meeting or the spring ISA meeting. This group of interested scholars, typically with historical links to the COW project, has traditionally been known as the Correlates of War Council. Through this forum, the project will continue to receive new ideas.

Data Set Procedures
Standards for the posting of data sets under the COW project will be guided by principles of replicability and accuracy. Each new release of a data set will be accompanied by a unique version number to ensure the possibility of tracing and replicating data analysis. The COW project will keep track of reported errors and questions, and will release new revised versions at regular intervals, typically every six months to one year if minor errors are discovered and corrected. If major errors or problems are discovered, a release may occur in the interim.

Working Data Set Archive
The COW project typically has many data collection efforts ongoing at any time. In many cases, this has meant that partially updated data sets have not been completed as quickly as we would like. To facilitate the use and completion of such data sets, sets on which some work has been done but which are not yet fully extended in time, fully checked for consistency with other data sets, or fully reviewed for accuracy, COW will seek to maintain a working data set archive of partial data sets. Such data sets must be used by scholars at their own risk. However, we seek reaction, problems, and corrections to such data sets so that when COW returns to those sets, the work can continue more rapidly.

Support
The Correlates of War project is supported by the Program on Empirical International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Institutional support has been critical to the project, and is gratefully acknowledged.

<Governance Structures Revised January 2005>