We present the first release of the data and compact-source catalogue for the JCMT Large
Program SCUBA-2 Continuum Observations of Pre-protostellar Evolution (SCOPE). SCOPE
consists of 850 μm continuum observations of 1235 Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (PGCCs)
made with the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 on the James Clerk Maxwell
Telescope. These data are at an angular resolution of 14.4 arcsec, significantly improving upon
the 353 GHz resolution of Planck at 5 arcmin, and allowing for a catalogue of 3528 compact
sources in 558 PGCCs. We find that the detected PGCCs have significant sub-structure,
with 61 per cent of detected PGCCs having three or more compact sources, with filamentary
structure also prevalent within the sample. A detection rate of 45 per cent is found across the
survey, which is 95 per cent complete to Planck column densities of N(H2) > 5 × 10^21 cm^−2.
By positionally associating the SCOPE compact sources with young stellar objects, the star
formation efficiency, as measured by the ratio of luminosity to mass, in nearby clouds is found
to be similar to that in the more distant Galactic Plane, with the column density distributions
also indistinguishable from each other