19 November 2024

Publication Integrity Week 2024 takes place on 18-22 November 2024 and is hosted by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE). In line with our commitment to ethical publishing, The Company of Biologists is a member of several organisations dedicated to maintaining standards in publishing ethics, including COPE. This year’s Publication Integrity Week includes sessions on plagiarism, working together, the future of publication ethics, paper mills and dealing with data. At The Company of Biologists, we are always working to develop and improve our policies and practices to ensure our papers uphold high ethical standards, and to better serve the needs of our communities. In this post, we present some key information regarding our publication integrity work with special attention given to the themes to be discussed in this year’s Publication Integrity Week.

The Company of Biologists has a team of publication integrity specialists, and all our accepted papers are screened for plagiarism as well as image and data problems. In 2023, we detected potential issues with 286 papers, a slight increase from the previous year. Most of these potential cases related to figure issues and image duplication, along with suspected plagiarism (Figure 1).

Across our journals, issues were mainly detected at the pre-publication stage, meaning that they could be resolved prior to publication of the article. The majority of these cases were resolved within a few weeks and in only a small proportion of cases did we have to reject, withdraw or revoke acceptance of manuscripts. However, we also handled concerns raised on 44 published articles, and these often took much longer to resolve. Overall, these investigations culminated in 9 Publisher’s Notes/Expressions of Concern, 18 Corrections and 0 Retractions in 2023. These data demonstrate the importance of stringent pre-publication checks to ensure the integrity of our published papers, and we are grateful to our authors for working constructively with us to resolve potential concerns raised.

At the Company, we partner with a number of companies and organisations to ensure that we stay at the forefront of publication integrity practices. We use iThenticate to check all papers for potential plagiarism prior to acceptance, and screen for image aberrations and duplications both manually and using Proofig AI. We recognise the importance in working together across different sectors in the publishing lifecycle, and will contact research institutes, when relevant, using a defined workflow based on COPE guidelines. We are also a part of cross-publisher initiatives, including being a member of the STM Image Alterations & Duplications working group as part of the STM Integrity Hub. Our journals are also working to adapt their workflows to identify papers originating from papermills and are currently trialling different papermill-detection tools. Although we perform rigorous publication-integrity checks, we know that standards evolve with time, and that the small minority of bad actors trying to manipulate publishing are constantly finding new ways to exploit the system. We therefore work proactively to improve our practices.

We look forward to this year’s Publication Integrity Week to gain more insight into the publication integrity spectrum and how we can improve as a Company. Online sessions are happening throughout the week; find out more about publication integrity by attending a session.