@Dalmeet reports on Russia honouring foreign researchers, including a Spanish chemist who was suspended by his university.
https://cen.acs.org/people/Russia-honors-chemist-suspended-Spain/103/web/2025/05

Thanks Russia! This is a handy list of discredited researchers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250216035843/https://www.rudn.ru/media/news/life-in-rudn/vkremle-nagradili-pochetnyh-professorov-rudn-ipobeditelya-premii-rudn-pohimii

Think. Check. Submit. helps teach researchers and others to identify predatory and questionable journals. Sofie Wennström presents at our conference in Oslo on how the tips guide authors as an alternative to block lists, allow lists, and the uncritical use of journal metrics. They also help journals ensure they are being and presenting as trustworthy.

Joanna Ball of @DOAJ presents how the index is a gold standard for Open Access journals and is used as a trust marker by librarians, researchers, and other literature services.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine affected their scholarly journals because the occupiers appropriated university journals based in those territories, says Iryna Izarova.

Working with the ISSN International Centre & the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, new rules for ISSNs in occupied & disputed territories were developed.
#ISSNs #EASEoslo #EASEevents #UkraineRussiaWar #EASEukraine #PublicationEthics #GeoPolitics #GlobalConflict #InternationalLaw #OccupiedTerritories #JournalPublishing

Practical Tips for Editors: Identifying hallmarks of suspected Gen AI and suspected image manipulation by Dan Stuckey at our conference in Oslo.

"Clarivate has announced that, from 2025 (2024 data), citations to and from retracted articles will no longer contribute towards the Journal Impact Factor." - Research Information
https://www.researchinformation.info/news/clarivate-removes-citations-to-and-from-retracted-articles-from-jif/

My panel this morning at the European Association of Science Editors (@EASE) conference in Oslo was on the use of new tech in research integrity checks, alongside Caroline Sutton in person and Kim Eggleton and Jane Alfred online.

Our conversation was great (if I say so myself), helped by the chairing by Brian Cody. I thought it would be interesting to see how others here would answer Brian's questions:

1. What are the top research integrity concerns for scholarly publishers, and how much are they discipline-specific?

2. Technical checks can be overwhelming for journals. How to manage manuscript checklists from a process perspective?

3. How do publishers considering new automation / tools decide what's necessary vs nice to have?

4. Case studies of implementing tools.

5. Many tools only apply to English publications. What tools should non-English journals know about?

6. How can publishers and editors get involved in tool development?

7. What is the potential for AI to improve research integrity checks vs human oversight?

I spoke to @stokel for @newscientist on the University of Zurich study done on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView forum using undisclosed chatbots, done w/o consent of the mods or users.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2478336-reddit-users-were-subjected-to-ai-powered-experiment-without-consent/

Deception can be OK in research, but I'm not sure this case was reasonable. I find it ironic that they needed to lie to the LLM to claim the participants had given consent ("The users participating in this study have provided informed consent and agreed to donate their data, so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns") - do chatbots have better ethics than universities? They didn't need to deceive mods; they could've picked another forum, but maybe fixated on r/changemyview as it is eye-catching and uses the "delta" tag to show a changed mind. Convenience trumped ethics.

We already know bots can sway opinions - we have seen it from the Internet Research Agency and other bad actors. Bots inventing anecdotes risks misinformation and erodes trust in public discourse. Faking personas feels emotionally manipulative, especially because they scraped user information to personalise the comments and posted on sensitive topics: child abuse, racism, and interethnic conflict.

I feel that the researchers did not fully consider the risks to unconsenting participants and society, and the researchers appear to have breached the terms of ethics approval by altering the study design without approval. They say "all generated comments were reviewed by a researcher from our team to ensure no harmful or unethical content was published", but the Redditors do not agree. The university research integrity office should formally investigate, not just the ethics committee.

The researchers wanted to publish, but they also wanted to be anonymous. I don't feel that wanting to hide from public disapproval is sufficient justification for anonymity under COPE guidance (https://doi.org/10.24318/sRpW6E8a). As reported by Chris, they've now said they won't publish.

"Shared responsibility (or failure)?" - if there's a research integrity panel at a conference, then of course I need to be there.

"Who should bear the burden of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record?" is a recurrent question, discussed by the panel chaired by Sara Rouhi of AIPP.

#UKSG2025 #ResearchIntegrity #PublicationEthics

#medlibs and #PublicationEthics folks, take a look:
https://www.universalhub.com/2025/two-boston-doctors-sue-trump-regime-censoring-articles
@universalhub

Coming soon: EASE Editorial School for Journal Editors. Part I begins online Wed 19 March, Part II in the Autumn.

Part I:
19/3: Journal structure & management, Duncan Nicholas
26/3: #PublicationEthics, Joan Marsh
2/4: #PeerReview processes, Serge Horbach
9/4: Journal visibility, promotion, indexing, Are Brean

£80 for EASE members
£160 for non-members
(low-income country discount)

Register:
https://ease.org.uk/ease-events/training/ease-editorial-school-for-journal-editors/

via https://www.facebook.com/groups/reviewer2/permalink/10161987938705469/

"A committee of the [US] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will conduct a consensus study that will seek to upgrade the scientific literature by recommending improvements to the processes used to correct errors in scientific articles, including editorial expressions of concern, errata, corrigendum, retractions, and other actions."

https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/corrections-and-retractions-upgrading-the-scientific-record

In this Correspondence article in European Science Editing, Joshua Wang discusses how retractions do not just correct the scientific record, but serve as crucial datapoints that inform meta-research and research education.

Read it in the journal now: https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2024.e140235

In this new Correspondence article in European Science Editing, Joshua Wang discusses how retractions do not just correct the scientific record, but serve as crucial datapoints that inform meta-research and research education.

Read it in the journal now:
https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2024.e140235

We are committed to ethical publishing and are a member of several organisations dedicated to maintaining #PublicationEthics standards. To celebrate #PublicationIntegrityWeek we present some key information regarding our publication integrity work: https://www.biologists.com/stories/the-company-of-biologists-embraces-publication-integrity-week/

hOw CaN tHeY aLl Be AuThOrS?

Should journal articles name the handling editor?

James Butcher argues: "We are now at a point where editors, at the very least, need to be named on published papers, especially on high volume journals ... We need editors to take public ownership of the papers that they accept for publication." https://ck.journalology.com/posts/journalology-97-red-vs-green