This week is Publication Integrity Week, a recently established annual event to highlight issues and challenges around integrity in scholarly communications. The stated aim of the week this year is to focus on four main areas: evolution of scholarship, conflicting incentives, collaboration and practical ethics.
It seems fitting to reflect on these issues this week of all weeks, as leading figures from the academic library community and its stakeholders gathered in the balmy surroundings of Charleston for the annual conference of the same name. But to what extent are librarians thinking about problems related to publishing integrity – if at all?
False flags
The issue is undeniably uppermost in librarians’ minds, as evidenced by the 17 sessions that included the word ‘integrity’ in their descriptions. One of those sessions was titled ‘When a publisher discovers fraudulent behavior from an institution or author, would librarians and institutions want to know?’, and perhaps surprisingly, many attendees voted either ‘No’ or ‘Don’t know’ when asked if librarians should be informed.
So why the pushback? It was interesting to listen to some of the reasons why librarians don’t see themselves as being involved in this question. One librarian at the session cited the possibility of false flags should the information on a given author be wrong, and another cited the recent tragic case of Cambridge University academic Jason Arday. Any university employee will understandably be very cautious when dealing with sensitive issues such as author integrity. Additionally, several librarians cited workload considerations in determining whether they should be involved in such circumstances.
Matter of trust
When the question of who was responsible for matters of publishing integrity within academic institutions was opened up, the answer seemed to be that – in the absence of a specific person with this specific remit – it did fall to the librarian, simply because they were the most trusted person at a university to deal with such matters. Indeed, attendees reflected that at a time where doubts about research and researchers were spiralling due to misinformation, paper mills, predatory journals and AI slop, it was trust in people that was absolutely key in an institutional context, and librarians were more trusted than anyone on campus. It was also felt that they were closer to the issue as they often had oversight of the article processing charges (APCs) being paid for authors to publish, some of whom may subsequently be the focus of accusations of fraudulent behavior.
Trying to find a way through the conflict between trust and workload threw up some interesting possible paths forward. China was cited as a country with robust mandates and enforcement, but this must come hand-in-hand with adequate resourcing, and there was a clear underlying sense of dissatisfaction. There were also calls for other stakeholders to be more prominent in this process, particularly funders, research integrity offices and scholarly societies. Central to the ways forward discussed were good data and evidence, which were essential for any actions librarians and their institutions may take when concerns are raised. For all of us involved in scholarly communications, trust and robust data are vital, not just to ensure useful products are made available for people to use, but to support the huge value those very people bring to scholarly endeavors.
