Publishing with Integrity

You did not handle the submission, choose the reviewers or accept the paper. But you are now the Editor-in-Chief. When an integrity concern emerges from the journal's past, who is responsible for dealing with it? ...

A retraction changes the status of one paper. But research does not exist in isolation. Other papers may have cited it, relied on its data, adopted its methods or incorporated its findings into systematic reviews. So what happens to that downstream research when the original ...

Authors sometimes need to be added to, removed from or reordered on a paper after submission. There can be perfectly legitimate reasons for doing this. But authorship changes can also be a warning sign of gift authorship, authorship sales or paper-mill activity. How difficult should ...

Last week I asked whether journals really know who their authors are. In most cases, they do not. If that is a weakness in scholarly publishing, should authors have to prove who they are before their work is published? ...

Authorship matters enormously in academia. It influences careers, promotions, grants, rankings and reputations. Yet when we submit a paper, how much does the journal really know about who we are? In an age of paper mills, authorship-for-sale and organised research fraud, is it still enough ...

Retraction does not normally make a published paper disappear. Even papers containing serious errors, fabricated data or plagiarism usually remain part of the scholarly record, clearly marked as retracted. When, if ever, should a journal be able to delete a published article completely? This edition ...