We talked with Angie Hunter, whose team helps detect issues and safeguard ethical practices across our journal portfolio to build a high-quality research base that readers can trust.
Public trust in science has never been more important, and our teams work every day to safeguard it. Concerns about publishing integrity issues across the spectrum of research have increased in recent years as a growing range of challenges have become more prevalent and salient.
We talked with Angie Hunter, who leads the Publishing Integrity Office at ACS Publications, about the tools her team uses to combat those challenges, and how their work helps build a high-quality research base that our readers can trust.
What role does the ACS Publishing Integrity Office play in ensuring trust?
Our motto at ACS Publications is “Most Trusted. Most Cited. Most Read.”, and it’s very intentional that we lead with the importance of trust. The work our office does is very focused on helping ensure the scientific community can trust what they read in our journals and cite it with confidence.
The two primary things we do fall under the umbrellas of publication ethics and research data where the focus is "trust, but verify."
Publication ethics covers a wide variety of activities, from relatively simple conflicts of interest to deliberately unethical activities such as paper mills, paid authorship, and so on. Ultimately, we’re trying to ensure that whenever we publish an article, it’s been vetted to the best of our ability using the various tools that we have, as well as relying on both our professional editors at the top of their fields and our network of expert peer reviewers to assess those manuscripts prior to publication.
In terms of research data, it’s about establishing data policies, setting out procedures for handling particular issues, and providing an internal help desk staffed by scientists who can understand the data. Putting all these pieces in place means that if a potential issue arises regarding a submission, we have a centralized function that can review the facts and provide the journal editor with all the relevant details to make an informed decision about what to do.
Publication ethics and research ethics sometimes get conflated. Where do you view the differences between the two?
Publishing integrity is about the reliability of the record, whereas research integrity is about how the research was done. Publication ethics usually involves issues with authorship disputes, conflicts of interest, or issues related to the published record.
When we look at research integrity, we're thinking about the data that upholds that scientific article: does it exist? Is it all present? Could a reader reproduce that work with the information provided? Research ethics issues often involve image manipulation or duplication, data falsification or manipulation, or reusing previously published work.
It's like a Venn diagram, and there's an area where research and publication ethics overlap. We use certain criteria to identify publication ethics concerns and certain criteria for research ethics that cover data and research integrity, but they are not mutually inclusive or exclusive.
Has the nature of the work of the Publishing Integrity Office changed over the last few years?
The most common problem about ten years ago was plagiarism, which is relatively simple to identify: either a paper contains plagiarized material, or it doesn’t.
By comparison, some of the emerging issues that our office handles are far more complex and nuanced. It takes somebody that's experienced with both publication ethics and research integrity to be able to review them.
For instance, a case that initially seems quite minor may be significantly more complex beneath the surface, like noticing a corresponding author being added at the final revision stage and uncovering an organized program of paid, fraudulent authorship.
We are always evaluating our systems and processes to prevent abuse by bad actors. It’s our role to uphold the trust in the articles in our portfolio of ACS journals, and we take that responsibility seriously.
What are the biggest challenges you think publishers are currently facing in relation to publication and research ethics?
This area is rapidly evolving as AI becomes more prevalent, but new tools and capabilities are emerging alongside new challenges.
A few years ago, we had relatively few effective tools to reliably detect problems — mostly around plagiarism. We were largely reliant on the expertise of human reviewers and editors to identify some of the more complex cases. Now we’re seeing a much wider variety of ethical issues, but we also have access to an increased number of tools within the Publishing Integrity Office that can help detect and flag problematic submissions with a high degree of confidence.
With all these tools, though, there’s always a human component. The software might allow us to carry out checks faster, but we need to make sure all our editors are trained to understand and interpret the results. We don't want to introduce bias into the decision-making process or confuse our authors. The ultimate goal is to make sure that everything is set for the journal editorial teams to make more informed decisions, and that human component remains most critical of all.
AI use has both positive and negative repercussions. We have the potential for misuse of things like generative AI to create fake data and papers. On the other hand, we also have the ability to create and utilize more tools to speed up science. We also see the frequency of issues occurring increasing for us and for all publishers. I don’t think anyone really knows exactly where it’s going next, but we’re at the forefront of this space and evolving our practices along with it.
How does ACS handle cases where there are potential breaches of research or publication ethics? What kind of steps do we go through?
Of course. We have detailed ethical guidelines and processes that are guided by best practices within the industry. I can’t go into all the specifics, but broadly speaking, there are a few key parts to the process.
First, ACS Publications is a member of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE), and we follow their guidance in handling ethical issues. We’re fortunate to have one of our team members serving on the COPE council, so we have a direct line into high-level discussions about the emerging issues that allow us to be forward-looking as we design and update our policies. We’re also a member of the STM Integrity Hub and incorporate their workflows and guidance into our processes too.
When a potential violation of research or publication ethics is identified, we’ll investigate in the background in conjunction with the journal’s Editors, using clear and consistent procedures and thoroughly documenting the findings, while remaining impartial. When you lean on these two pieces –– industrywide best practice and our own ethical guidelines –– then you’re usually going on the right path.
ACS Publications also has an independent ombudsperson that authors can approach if they feel that our Editors, Editorial Advisory Board members, or reviewers have conducted themselves inappropriately. Holding ourselves to that high standard of conduct ensures that we’re committed to, and mindful of, quality both inside and outside the organization.
In addition to the resources we provide for editors, we also require them to take ethics courses designed specifically to prepare them for when an ethics case crosses their desk. The Editor-in-Chief course provides guidance, best practices, and case examples from which to learn. In 2025, we’ll offer a similar course for all Associate Editors.
Where do you think the gaps are for publishers to work with the research community to help raise awareness of ethical issues? How is ACS Publications filling those gaps?
More and more, we’re working to help researchers prepare for these new challenges.
The volume of research integrity issues we’ve been investigating has grown by 50% in the last three years, and I know we’re not the only publisher facing this problem. Given the increase and our focus on trust at ACS Publications, we’ve grown our internal capacity significantly since 2020 and we have more expansion set for 2025.
Our focus is to streamline internal practices so that we have more time to facilitate outreach and education with our key stakeholders: sharing best practices for data, preparing a manuscript, conducting certain pre-submission data integrity checks, and so on.
As we consider more proactive approaches, it would be great to start the process further upstream (during and before the research) at the universities, and specifically for the next generation of students and scholars. This would of course help us when a submission reaches an ACS journal, but it would also help the authors and everyone involved to be better prepared.
To help these early researchers, ACS On Campus offers modules on "10 Tips for Managing Your Data," "10 Tips for Scholarly Publishing Ethical Authorship," and other modules that can help less experienced authors and reviewers. In addition, ACS Publications also offers free modules in ACS Author Lab and ACS Reviewer Lab which provide invaluable insight to the submission and peer review process — including modules dedicated to ethics.
We recognize that this is an extra step in the process for researchers, so we are looking for ways we can make the information easier to absorb, whether it’s presenting information in a different way or providing training webinars or presenting at seminars. Greater education is a key to future success.
Why do you think public trust in science is important?
This question keeps coming up as more and more people take a critical eye to the publishing process, and my response is that you have to be able to rely on the veracity of science because it’s the foundation of so much of our understanding of the world.
When I was a practicing scientist myself, being able to reproduce the results was critical. It was so important to be able to get the same results by following the same procedure as another scientist, and I’ve always taken that lens to scientific publishing.
This is a foundational part of our data policy, particularly with journals that have a data check to ensure all the relevant details are there. We want to be sure that when a scientist wants to reproduce the research, they have the information they need, including accurate procedures and all the data necessary to support the conclusions.
Can you think of any examples of where publication ethics and open science practices align?
Open science is about transparency as much as it is access. Greater transparency isn't inherently more ethical, but it's a tool we use to shine light on practices and can help to keep everyone honest. For open data, this also means allowing other researchers to dig into all of the details of your work, which can help them more easily reproduce and answer questions they might have had.
There is a subset of authors who choose to be at the forefront because they believe that open science is the right thing to do — they’re making their work available as preprints, they’re uploading their data to open repositories, they’re publishing a data availability statement, and so on.
I’m a big believer in leading by example, and that’s what these authors are doing. If you have a great research group with a strong international reputation, you know that your work is going to attract a bit more scrutiny. Following open science principles means pre-empting a lot of that and making sure you’ve given as much detail as possible about how you’ve achieved your results so others can build on them. I think that would probably be the best example of the intersection between open science and high-quality publications.
Publishing integrity: learn more with free webinar access
If you would like to further explore discussions around publishing integrity, you can register for free on-demand access to our recent series of webinars: Beyond the Open Access Transition.