Maintaining Research Integrity at Scale Brings Challenges and Opportunities for Collaboration

By Adya Misra, PhD (Research Integrity and Inclusion Manager, Sage) <Adya.Misra@sagepub.co.uk>

Publishers are often seen to be the ultimate implementers of research integrity principles, as we sit towards the end of the research process. Yet, as a publisher, we are likely to only see a subsection of research integrity matters brought to our attention while many others are being dealt with by institutions, funders or other regulatory bodies.

On a day-to-day basis, research integrity teams within scholarly publishing handle a variety of concerns brought to their attention. From a seemingly banal instance of minor plagiarism in a submission to more serious breaches such as image or data fabrication, duplicate publications, or peerreview manipulation; as the awareness and understanding of research integrity principles proliferate in the community, readers are increasingly alerting publishers to these breaches. Our primary function as publisher is to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record and help maintain reader’s trust in research. Publishers should investigate all concerns brought to them in accordance with guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to ensure fairness, transparency of process and consistency in decision making across the industry. COPE is an independent organisation that provides the scholarly publishing industry with guidance and best practices on how to handle various ethical issues in journals publishing.

At Sage, we pride ourselves on the knowledge that each concern brought to us is independently validated by a central Research Integrity Team before following up with any external stakeholders. Our primary success in the creation of this centralised team is that we ensure consistency in decision making across our portfolio even in an era of increasing — and increasingly creative — attempts to thwart scholarly integrity. To do so successfully, we’ve found that many parties involved — authors, publishers, librarians, and more — should work together to combat misconduct at multiple stages of the scholarly workflow.

Why Are People Breaching Research Integrity Principles?

As the pressure to publish has increased tremendously in the last few decades, the publishing industry is increasingly seeing researchers taking shortcuts to generate a research article. The scholarly ecosystem has traditionally been built around trust; when we peer review a research article, we take the author’s claims at face value while doing some checks for feasibility of the study design, methodology and the study findings. And in some disciplines, it is appropriate to undertake a quick analysis of the numbers to check whether the results are correct.

However, peer-review was designed to illicit constructive feedback on research, not undertake a full reproduction of the research to ensure the authors work is genuine. Peer review remains a voluntary pursuit, and as such a reviewer cannot be expected to detect all the errors in the research or be in a position to detect misconduct in addition to providing commentary on the research contribution, plausibility of the findings, and other feedback. Due to the limitations of peer review and the proliferation of publishing venues, combined with continued pressures to publish, there are increased opportunities for authors to breach research integrity.

As publishers seek to maximise their published output, there is a challenge in maintaining research integrity principles at scale. Publishers investigating research integrity concerns can often spend years resolving a single complaint; sometimes authors become unresponsive, or need additional time due to personal circumstances. Depending on the concern, additional review of data may be required, all of which takes time. This follow-up may lead to frustration among editors, authors and the complainant, and the inaccurate impression that publishers do not take these concerns seriously.

What Are The Most Challenging Research Integrity Concerns?

From my experience leading the research integrity team at Sage, there are a few concerns that are most challenging to address.

Third-party Involvement and Peer-review Manipulation

Authors are increasingly employing third-party services to submit their research to international journals. While many of these services have traditionally been related to language revision, some providers have taken steps to become scientific editors and provide a more technical revision. Many of these services are legitimate and help authors refine their research before submission to a journal. However, many providers have begun offering services around “guaranteed accepts,” “quick turnaround” and “rapid publication” to authors who may be struggling to get their research published or indeed have no research training but are expected to publish in order to get promoted in their academic role. These providers operate in specific subject areas and intercept the peer-review process at journals to facilitate easier or quicker acceptance.

More recently, these service providers have begun offering authorship slots to any researcher for a specific listed price without having to put in the effort required to write a research article. At the editorial office, this may look like significant changes to the author list towards the end of the peer-review process or after acceptance. We are starting to see websites advertising authorship slots across submission areas inviting researchers to pay a sum of money and receive an authorship slot without doing any research. Individuals posing as journal representatives are also approaching researchers with promises of help publishing their work. In many cases, authors provide their manuscript to a third party posing as a journal representative for a fee in the hopes of guaranteed publication.

Publishers are aware that these organisations pose as reviewers within journal submission systems in order to help accelerate the publication that may or may not have merit. Researcher Anna Abalkina has been instrumental in raising awareness of these commercial providers that are running a parallel publishing industry that poses a threat to research integrity and takes advantage of sometimes vulnerable authors.

While identifying these third-party actors can be a challenge, publishers often have circumstantial evidence that a submission is not genuine and comes from a third party based on prior knowledge, suspicious activity in their submissions system or recognizing patterns in submissions. Recent large-scale retractions in prominent publishers suggest that we are taking a stronger stance on these suspicious actors than ever before, removing their output from the literature and helping readers distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy articles.

Data Fabrication

Fabricated or falsified data is often tough to detect without resources and yet it has the potential to make an incredibly negative impact on the research community. There have been several recent high-profile instances where data was found to be fabricated or falsified by an author group or where there were serious concerns about the legitimacy of the findings. For instance, Ivermectin was touted as the COVID-19 miracle drug until a group of scientists looked at the evidence and found severe shortcomings in the published corpus. These recent instances have called into question not just individual research practices but also institutional governance for researchers, the role of peer review in detecting data fabrication and the role of the funder who may have provided grants to the authors.

Due to the complexity surrounding data fabrication and or falsification, specifically around limitations of sharing data that may be protected, many of these concerns may remain unresolved. Concerns raised on the PACE trial several years ago or the more recent Surgisphere study remain somewhat unresolved due to these competing issues of data confidentiality and data transparency. To deal with some of these issues, publishers are increasingly introducing stringent data policies where authors may be asked to provide the data underlying their figures at the time of submission or at later stages of review with the view that data sharing is likely to increase transparency and accountability as well as enable readers, students and other researchers to make use of the data provided to further the research questions posed.

Image Manipulation

In 2016, researcher Elisabeth Bik manually scanned 20,000+ articles across several journals containing potentially manipulated images. Her work highlighted the prevalence of this phenomenon and brought to the forefront some of the challenges associated with detection, investigation and follow-up of image concerns. Any form of data or image manipulation has been traditionally difficult to investigate as there are challenges around author intent. For example, a researcher may say that an image they generated confirmed the results but didn’t look good enough to publish, which led them to combine several different images to create one final image that looked appropriate. Alternatively, authors may routinely combine multiple images to create one final image that looks appropriate for a research article. In doing so, authors may be submitting images, results and conclusions that may be partially or completely incorrect. This can have an impact on the research community that relies on peer-reviewed literature to build their research as well as on readers or policymakers who may rely on the literature to form an opinion about a scientific phenomenon.

As this has become a significant issue, particularly for science, technology or medical (STM) journals, many publishers are now using a variety of image checking tools at various stages of the editorial workflow to identify concerns before they are published. While there is certainly more work to be done, as an industry, we have made significant strides in creating more robust policies and guidelines on image manipulation around what may be acceptable in a research article and what remains problematic.

Which Areas of Research Integrity Need More Attention?

Research integrity principles in publishing have become increasingly important in the last few years. Publishers are also increasingly addressing concerns of diversity, equity, inclusion and access which have strong links with research integrity. Some of the main issues include but are not limited to gender or racial diversity on editorial boards, citation inequality between genders or people who are racialized, publication of potentially harmful content in the publisher backfile and the potential misuse of academic free speech.

There have been some exciting developments in this area, spearheaded by a cross-publisher group formed in 2020 that has led the development of standard questions for self-reported diversity data collection and minimum standards for inclusion and diversity for scholarly publishing. However, recent research reports the stark inequalities faced by certain demographics when acting as reviewers, editors and authors which requires more attention.

Among conversations around barriers to entry and participation in scientific research more globally, publishers are increasingly adopting policies that combat some of these inherent biases in academia. For instance, in 2022, the World Conference on Research Integrity focused on the development of a Cape Town Statement that aims to promote equity and diversity in research collaboration. Several publishers have adopted the principles of the Global Code of Conduct to improve equity in research collaborations globally. These policies have been designed to ensure that the research we publish has not posed harm to its participants or any potential collaborators.

One of the continued frustrations within the academic community has been the speed with which some concerns are investigated and that readers are not appropriately informed of inaccurate research. We have heard this feedback at Sage and, while we are careful not to take short cuts in our investigation, we will urgently add Expressions of Concern to any article that has serious verifiable allegations where investigations are likely to take time.

Opportunities for Collaboration — What Can Authors Do to Uphold Research Integrity?

There are many steps authors can take to uphold research integrity principles. As publishers, we rely on research institutions to provide this support for new researchers to ensure that they are adhering to best practices in research conduct and reporting. Some of these include:

1) Agree who should be an author on the final publication and who will be added in the acknowledgements before starting the research to avoid disputes at a later stage;

2) Pre-specify a study protocol, considering registering the protocol on atrials registry for added transparency to clinical research;

3) Considering registered reports, a publication format that allows the peer review of methodology before the research has begun and granting researchers an in-principle acceptance regardless of the results. This format allows researchers to maintain the integrity of the scientific method;

4) Approaching the institutional ethics committee before working with human participants to avoid the possibility of tough questions later on in the process;

5) Conducting the research using an appropriate study design, with suitably sourced materials with the appropriate permissions in place, preferably in writing to avoid disputes later in the process;

6) Sharing any datasets to a stable and public repository with the community to help other researchers who rely on datasets for their work, maximise research transparency and increase chances of your datasets being cited;

7) Ensuring the work conducted is of the highest possible standard, original and done by the authors and/or contributors.

Many publishers offer regular webinars for authors and reviewers to enhance their knowledge of publishing and peer review in partnership with active researchers and members of Editorial Boards. These are opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing on key developments in the industry and can offer different perspectives to authors. Sage regularly hosts webinars on how to be a peer-reviewer, offering advice to researchers on various aspects of peer review. This year we are aiming to host regions specific webinars to cater to a specific researcher cohort and engage with any specific challenges in peer-review.

What Else Are Publishers Doing To Be More Proactive In Upholding Research Integrity?

In 2021, the STM Association formed the STM integrity Hub to directly tackle some of the challenges publishers are facing by bringing us all in one room. This resulted in publishers collaborating on mechanisms, tools and workflows to eliminate untrustworthy content from our collective corpus for the first time. Concerns around text recycling, duplicate submissions and image manipulation are no longer a problem for just one publisher. Rejecting the submission at one venue will direct this low-quality submission to end up at a different venue, which we all agree is detrimental to the research community. By participating in this programme, publishers have demonstrated their commitment to research integrity and acknowledged that the problems we face are too big to tackle alone.

Many publishers are developing tools in-house or harnessing the use of third-party technology to proactively stop untrustworthy or low-quality content from entering peer review. While many of these tools are in their infancy, tools such as Turnitin, which detects text re-use and recycling, are continuously improving their offering to help publishers safeguard their submissions. We are increasingly seeing the development of research integrity checks on submissions and the use of artificial intelligence to speed up these checks so that reviewers can focus on reviewing the content of the research instead of questioning its authenticity.

COPE has recently introduced membership to research institutions and is providing opportunities for publishers and institutions to work more collaboratively on research integrity matters. This is a significant development, as we can understand other stakeholder’s constraints and perspectives more deeply.

How Can Librarians Be Involved?

Librarians serve as gatekeepers for research access (in traditional and open access publications), validating which serials are high-quality through subscriptions and by listing them on their websites, and pointing patrons away from publications that should not be trusted. But beyond that, librarians can:

1. Help to educate patrons on the problems, consequences and impacts associated with unethical research behaviour;

2. Help build institution-wide policies for academic integrity to prevent and combat misconduct;

3. Become advocates for “laws, policies, and regulations that advance information integrity” on a broader scale such as in government policy science frameworks;

4. Where time and resources permit, create quality data hubs to support data sharing.

Librarians wear many hats, and at Sage, we believe that they play a key role in supporting the research happening by students and faculty across campus. By working in parallel — and even in collaboration — with publishers, authors, and organizations like COPE, together we can continue to make small progress toward eliminating dubious scholarly practices and raising standards for high-quality research.