Paper mills research and recommended actions. Highlights from the World Congress on Research Integrity, and a discussion on dealing with complaints.
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COPE Digest
June 2022, Vol 10
Issue 3: Published research integrity
Welcome to the June COPE Digest
Travel is once again becoming a part of my life. I recently returned from a wonderful trip to Cape Town, South Africa to participate in the 7th World Conference on Research Integrity ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) (WCRI). The 30-hour trip from New York to South Africa was well worth it. I loved reconnecting with professional colleagues that I had not seen in years and making new connections. The meeting was very active, exciting, and enlightening, with so many engaging sessions - it was hard to decide between the concurrent sessions.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Fostering research integrity in an unequal world”, and some participants took time to help formulate and draft the Cape Town statement on diversity, equity, and fairness in global collaborations ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) , which will be released soon. It was wonderful that the meeting took place in Africa for the first time, and we were able to hear from those directly impacted by historic inequities in financial and scientific resources.
As COPE Chair, I moderated a symposium panel on “When and how to report misconduct to institutions, journals, publishers, or elsewhere". This panel was organised by Matt Hodgkinson (COPE Council Member), who spoke on behalf of journals and publishers. Joining him on the panel were Paul Saner from the University of Cape Town and scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik. All three panelists gave engaging presentations on their perspectives of what works and what doesn’t when reporting issues to different stakeholders, with the audience then invited to ask questions. The audience was highly engaged and debated issues of confidentiality and how to better share information. Elisabeth even tested the audience on their ability to find the duplications and manipulations in some figures. Other issues that arose were whether peer review is broken, institutional actions against authors (overreactions), confidentiality and fear of lawsuits. Luckily, lunch forced us to stop, or we might have been
there for another hour.
Two other symposia especially held my interest. The first, “Recent advances in research integrity” highlighted recent advances as well as fostering reproducibility and the detection of flawed manuscripts. For the last topic, Joris van Rossum introduced the STM Integrity Hub ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) . This is a collaboration space that fosters cross publisher solutions to expansive integrity issues, such as duplicate submissions, image alterations, and paper mills. These areas are growing concerns for many COPE members, as reflected in the interviews held with publishers for the COPE and STM paper mills research report ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) . COPE, and COPE members, have been working with STM to support applications of the Hub to find solutions to these problems.
The second symposium was on paper mills and COPE has a special interest in this topic...
READ MORE ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) >
COPE Chair, Dan Kulp
[link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)
RESEARCH REPORT AND RECOMMENDED ACTIONS
Paper mills present a real threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. This COPE and STM research report is a call to action to those working across the research publishing landscape to work together to tackle the problem. The report gives an overview of paper mills, how they work, why they work and what we can collectively do about it.
Recommended actions for publishers, funders and research institutions:
* Education and training for editors and editorial staff to identify submitted papers
* Engagement with institutions and funders to change incentives for researchers
* Investigation of protocols to obstruct the progress of paper mills
* Continued investment in tools and processes to identify paper mill submissions
* A review of the investigative and retraction process taking into account the unique features of published paper mill papers
READ THE RESEARCH REPORT ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) >
** DEALING WITH COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE INTEGRITY OF PUBLISHED RESEARCH
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Between 2013 and 2015, COPE produced a number of documents on how to respond to the increasing number of people who were raising complaints about research integrity in journals, and more recently a COPE Forum dealt with how to coordinate complaints amongst multiple journals. Since then, complaints about integrity in research publications have become even more prevalent and the issues that they identify have become more complex. It is, therefore, timely to revisit these documents, and update the guidance.
COPE has produced a draft discussion document and we would like to hear your comments on this draft guidance. We welcome comments from journal editors and publishers, researchers/authors and academic institutions.
READ DISCUSSION DOCUMENT AND COMMENT ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) >
[link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)
COPE FORUM
WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2022: VIRTUAL
14:00-15:30pm (BST / UTC+1)
COPE Members: join us to discuss the topical issue "Dealing with complaints about the integrity of published research", followed by four new cases presented for discussion and advice from all those participating in the Forum.
New cases:
* Academic freedom
* Data integrity issues
* Managing an editor’s undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article
* Where should journals escalate serious concerns about an institution or institutional review board?
READ MORE AND REGISTER ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) >
In the News
** LATEST PUBLICATION ETHICS NEWS
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Each month, COPE Council members share publication ethics news which we share on social media and publish on the COPE website. Here are just a few recent articles:
* Researchers who make their data sets openly available should be valued as highly as authors of published papers.
* Springer Nature has released PySciDetect, open source research integrity software for identifying fake research, which is available for all publishers.
* A historian of science discusses whether peer review has a role in uncovering scientific fraud.
READ THE NEWS ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) >
** Submitting a guest editorial or opinion piece to COPE
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We welcome guest editorials and opinion articles regarding research and publication ethics from COPE members. Please read the COPE guest editorial policy ([link removed](PAPER-MILLS-RESEARCH-JUNE-2022-DIGEST)) before submitting your article.
** COPE Digest Editors:
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Nancy C Chescheir, MD, Editor-in-Chief, Reproductive, Female and Child Health
Deborah Kahn, COPE Trustee
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