Publishing with Integrity

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 ...

Peer review depends on academics giving their time and expertise without payment. For some, that is simply part of academic citizenship. For others, it is exploitation. But how far can that argument reasonably be taken, and how much unpaid labour should scholarly publishing expect? ...

Generative AI could make peer review faster, more systematic and less burdensome for reviewers. It could also produce inaccurate, excessively long reports while concealing how much of the reviewer’s judgement has been delegated to AI. If AI is already entering peer review, perhaps the real ...