Strength in numbers: the power of collaboration for research integrity

by - Gráinne McNamara, Research Integrity / Publication Ethics Manager, Karger - Silver sponsor of the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2024.

In scholarly publishing, the term ‘research integrity’ is increasingly discussed and its significance to the ecosystem is growing. With the dominance of paper mills in the consciousness of research integrity professionals, matched only by the emerging threat posed by Generative AI, a reoccurring theme has emerged in these discussions: collaboration. 

Increasingly, no longer are research integrity teams operating largely in isolation within their respective publishers, interacting only in specific contexts, such as COPE forums or webinars, or when a multi-journal complaint necessitates alignment. Particularly in the last three years, we have seen a diversification in the venues at which research integrity teams interact. In the spirit of the infamously misattributed proverb “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together”, this expansion of touchpoints between publishers’ research integrity teams should be expected to have a positive effect on the trustworthiness of the scholarly publishing landscape. 

As a medium-sized publisher publishing over 90 journals in the health sciences, with a small research integrity team, Karger Publishers is particularly well placed to see how this growth in collaboration can be beneficial. Reflecting on how this has impacted us and the industry overall, we can see that great progress has been made as well as several trends and areas for growth.

Technology

The most obvious advantage of combining forces for a publisher the size of Karger or for smaller emerging or society publishers is the enhanced availability of new technologies. The STM Integrity Hub was established to foster collaboration “between publishers of all sorts, shapes and sizes”. The development of tools through the hub has enabled the detection of manuscript submission irregularities faster than for each participant operating in isolation. For example, the first-of-its-kind detection of duplicate submissions across publishers via the STM Hub allowed publishers to discover violations of our Editorial Policies early in peer review. By having this information, we ensure peer review resources are directed to compliant submissions, critical at this point when peer reviewer time is limited. Inter-publisher collaboration for duplicate submission detection received a boost recently with the announcement that Elsevier’s full text analysis for matching manuscripts would be made available to the STM Integrity Hub, making it more difficult for infracting submissions to evade detection. According to this August 2024 announcement, 12 publishers were using this tool, including Karger. The maximum effectiveness of this tool can only be realised by full adoption across publishers, and we hope to see this number grow.

This year we have seen more examples of publishers working together to improve integrity tools. In March 2024, Wiley announced that Sage and IEEE would be partnering in the testing of their Papermill Detection service. While neither Sage nor IEEE could be classified as a small or medium-sized publisher, this collaboration perpetuates the growing trend of technology sharing between publishers for mutual benefit that we can expect to see continue.

Information 

A challenge for any research integrity team in 2024 is keeping up to date with the latest developments and threats across the industry. Here again, we are seeing how collaboration is supporting the work, particularly of smaller teams, allowing them to focus on maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record while staying informed. The COPE and STM study into the scale and impact of paper mills on publishers in 2022, to which Karger contributed data and information, marked the beginning of an increasingly collaborative effort to combat paper mills. This translated into a COPE working group on the topic, of which Karger is a member, continuing to this year’s at the World Conference of Research Integrity where paper mills were one of the key topics of discussion. Open communication between affected parties about paper mills will need to continue as long as the threat exists as publishers of all sizes try to stay ahead through the newest information and trends.

An abundance of new research integrity tools have become available in the last 3 years to help publishers uphold the highest integrity standards, no matter their scale of operation. However, testing and piloting new technologies is a time-consuming necessity for research integrity teams. In addition to the collaborative information sharing we’ve seen through the STM Integrity Hub duplicate submission detection, the Hub's Image Alteration and Duplications Working Group supports the community by providing an overview of the available image integrity tools and their features, allowing publishers to make informed decisions and comparisons between available products. In a sea of information, crowd-sourcing trusted information can make the difference for a small or medium-sized publisher to save time that can be invested into misconduct detection.

Expertise 

A product of information and technology sharing is the enhanced expertise of research integrity professionals at publishers, as well as in those working more broadly in the scholarly communication ecosystem with an interest in research integrity. COPE has long been a hub of experience sharing between members and in 2024 this continued with the launch of formal Advisor roles for volunteers to share knowledge and expertise. We have also started to see the development of subject-specialised expertise-sharing collaboration. In the physical sciences, three publishers established the ‘Purpose-led Publishing’ initiative in which participants defined and committed to “a set of industry standards that underpin high-quality, ethical scholarly communication”. Whether we will see more examples of subject-specialised publishers of various sizes coming together to define standards for their area remains to be seen. 

On the other end of the specialisation spectrum, the United2Act initiative, of which Karger is a signatory and member of Working Group 2, is a prime example of the wider research integrity community coming together and translating expertise and leveraging technology into tangible outcomes to combat the threat of paper mills. Furthermore, many of the groups’ outputs, for example, educational resources and trust marker development, are likely to have benefits far beyond the initial scope of paper mills.

Taking the lessons learned from publisher-publisher communication to the wider research integrity community is an integral step in embedding research integrity throughout the scholarly communication cycle. At Karger, we have seen the benefits of collaborating with larger and smaller publishers in improving our detection capabilities and expertise. We plan to continue, with our colleagues across publishers and other organizations with an interest in research integrity, collaborating to advance upholding research integrity standards. Naturally, the benefits of collaboration are not limited to strengthening research integrity. A recent blog in this series provided a view from the publishing systems perspective on the necessity and benefits of collaboration. We will undoubtedly see publisher-publisher and publisher-systems collaboration grow in the coming years as bad actors continue to pose a threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. By actively seeking collaboration, publishers of all sizes can build on each other’s technology, information and expertise of each other and go far and fast, together.

About the author

Dr. Gráinne McNamara is the Research Integrity / Publication Ethics Manager at Karger Publishers, where she and her team are engaged in developing research integrity policies, conducting investigations and advising researchers on best practice.

She has worked in research integrity in publishing since 2017 and is grateful to all the researchers and colleagues who have, and continue to, share their experience and expertise in that time.

www.karger.com

Guest Post: Centering reproducibility and transparency in health science research

By Grainne McNamara, Research Integrity/Publication Ethics Manager at Karger, Silver sponsor of the ALPSP Conference and Awards 2022 

At Karger Publishers, we have over 130 years of experience connecting healthcare practitioners, researchers and patients with the latest research and emerging best practice, covering the whole cycle of knowledge. As a publisher in the health sciences with a broad audience, we have always centered the needs of our readers by tailoring our content to them. Complementing our long history of publishing journals and books for clinicians, researchers, and patients, in 2021 we launched the online blog The Waiting Room. In 2022 the Waiting Room Podcast launched, bringing breaking research to patients, caregivers, and the general public in easy-to-understand, jargon-free formats. Also this year, we made it possible for authors to submit plain language summaries in our journal Skin Appendage Disorders with their articles. These provide interested readers with easy-to-understand descriptions of the latest research in this field of dermatology. In all these developments, we are acutely aware of the great responsibility that comes with communicating health science research to a general audience.

At Karger Publishers, we employ a rigorous peer review process and are transparent about the evaluation criteria for articles that we publish. However, with increasing digitalization comes big challenges, as information can be disseminated, but also misinterpreted, at speed. With these challenges come opportunities to do better, and we asked ourselves: How can we do more for our community?

At Karger, we are open for Open. We have embraced the Open Science movement – in thought and action. Since 2021 all our research articles have been published with a data availability statement, directing readers to the location of the dataset(s) underlying these findings and providing thorough guidance to authors on the how and why to share their data. However, we see data availability statements as just the beginning.

Well-established reporting guidelines exist for almost every study type and provide a structure for authors, reviewers, and readers to understand what is, and should be, reported in an article. As such, adherence to community-standard reporting guidelines, such as CONSORT or PRISMA, has been the expectation for all our journals for many years. As a health sciences publisher, we know that case reports are an early stage but crucial part of evidence-based medicine decision making. That is why we have eight specialty Gold Open Access journals dedicated exclusively to communicating case reports. For case reports to be their most responsibly influential and effective, clear and transparent reporting, again, is crucial. That is why, as of September 2022, completion of the CARE checklist is a requirement for all submissions to these journals. We believe that by improving the consistency and transparency of case report reporting, we underscore the importance of transparency in health sciences research.

We present breaking research findings every day to our growing community and take great care in the trust placed in us by readers as a publisher of health sciences. We recognize that the ultimate guarantee of the reliability of a finding is its reproducibility - that is, the ability to find the same result again and again. We also know that transparency and detail of methodology are significant barriers to the reproducibility of a result and that adherence to reporting guidelines can improve the clarity of an article. That is why we recently expanded our guidance to authors on the use of reporting guidelines and endorsed the Materials Design Analysis Reporting Framework, as part of every journal’s reproducibility policy. We believe that by centering the reproducibility of methodology and reproducibility of results in our publications, we are progressing the conversation around reproducible-by-default health sciences research.

We could not make these steps towards reproducibility-by-default without the support of our community of outstanding editors and reviewers. We aim to recognize and support our community of experts in a variety of ways. This includes providing training for the next generation of peer reviewers as well as interactive discussion webinars on the latest topics in peer review and reproducibility. We also benefit from the cross-publisher organizations, such as COPE and ALPSP, that facilitate conversations on best practices in reproducibility.

At Karger, as we expand our portfolio of research communication, we grow, in step, our focus on reliability and trust in those findings. By empowering researchers, institutions, funders, and policy makers to maximize impact in health sciences, we are taking strides toward our goal to help shape a smarter, more equitable future.

Karger was a silver sponsor of the ALPSP Conference and Awards held in Manchester UK in September 2022.  The 2023 ALPSP Conference will be 13-15 September 2023.