David has mentioned complexity in the publishing landscape and certainly this topic – Publishing Ethics and Impact - does not disappoint in this regard.

As Publisher we are receiving a growing numbers of requests from editors for guidance about a wide range of increasingly intricate ethical issues – from dubious author practices to peer review challenges.

Is this to do with limited research funding and associated pressures to publish? To be sure, this is not a modern problem.

In 1830, Charles Babbage (19-century mathematician who was considered father of

the modern computer) spoke of ‘unreliable science;’ discussed hoaxes, forgeries, data trimming and “cooking” at great length.

We want to spend 10 minutes surveying some ethical issues and what can be done about impact in all its dimensions.

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Owing to manufactured peer reviewers, more than 100 papers have been retracted over the past 2 years, according to Retraction Watch.

A recently released report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK found that 58% of researchers felt tempted or under pressure to compromise on research integrity.

After investigations with several publishers including T&F, COPE recently released this statement…

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Misconduct – is it really increasing, or are we getting better at recognising it and doing something about it?

As you can see this graph shows the number of retractions growing from about 2000.

Is this related to a growing number of papers, to the digital age with its

discoverability tools, or to an increasing number of cases of scholarly misconduct? -

A third of these retractions can be attributed to honest error, roughly 40% were due

to some form of misconduct such as data fabrication, dual submissions, duplicate publication, and plagiarism - or as we prefer to say ‘originality’ problems.

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Other dubious author practices include a range of author deals such as coercion authorship…honorary or ‘gift’ authorship…mutual support authorship…and duplication authorship…

There are also cases where authors fake whole papers for their own career

advancement….

But are the metrics and tools able to cope with this?

In one widely reported case, Emilio Delgado from the University of Granada in Spain created a number of fake papers, with bogus author details, not for his own benefit, but to expose some of the flaws with Google Scholar and its online metrics tools...which it did quite effectively in artificially raising the author’s H-Index. Now cycling fans may be interested to know that Delgado attributed the authorship of these fake papers to one Alberto Contador, who saw his own fair share of controversy (perhaps Lance Armstrong).

In another case, the non-existent peer review on a predatory open access journal

was exposed in this outrageous paper being accepted for publication by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (a).

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Operating in tandem with publication pressures, the proliferation of metrics as a means of measuring performance is fraught with challenges and opportunism.

Do well to recall Goodhart’s Law here – it states that “when a measure becomes a

target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

Now as this Matrix of Impact here shows, the task of measuring impact is of course

not a simple proposition.

Typically, those measures which are easiest to assess (such as abstract views)

represent lower value in terms of corresponding outcomes (or impact). Moreover,

many of these measures can be easily gamed and manipulated.

This graph here from our global author survey, is quite illustrative here as it shows how authors themselves think they will be measured over the next ten years.

And the reason I’m drawing your attention to these measures of citations,

downloads and Alt-metrics, is that they can all be used - and abused - in different ways…

Reducing anything to a number removes its context…

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The journal Impact Factor is one metric which is being increasingly placed under the spotlight.

In 2013, a group of journal editors and publishers convened in San Francisco to draft what became known as DORA, or the Declaration on Research Assessment. This declaration intends to halt the practice of correlating the Impact Factor to the merits of specific researcher contributions, and recommends that all stakeholders in the research community refrain from using journal-based metrics as a surrogate measure of quality in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

Now as I’m sure everyone here is acutely aware, these concerns are certainly not unfounded. However despite increasing concerns about how the Impact Factor is being used, it is still a key metric for authors and editors…

Some common tricks of the trade for boosting Impact Factor’s include policies to pursue only research that is potentially citable, rather than being interesting or important….and editors requiring authors to cite papers previously published in the journal as a prerequisite of acceptance.

Now related to this issue, is the emerging problem of what’s being termed citation

stacking and citation cartels.

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This practice involves improper citations relationships between different groups of journals to increase citations.

In 2013, 37 journals were added to the banned list by Thomson Reuters…with 14

of these being identified cases of citation stacking. This compares with only 7 journals being banned in total in 2006.

We have had two recent cases of citation-stacking on T&F journals as shown here, with one Editorial team ultimately stepping down, and another agreeing to significantly revised editorial processes.

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So what is T&F is doing to help address ethical issues? Author education and mentoring is high on the agenda. Indeed, we strongly believe that author education is the key to reducing problems.

We are now running regular author and reviewer workshops, and have a plethora of information available for our authors and editors on our Editor Resources and Author Services websites. All T&F Editors are entitled to a COPE membership, with their online resources and seminars.

We’re currently working on the integration of ORCID author IDs into all of our journals…As well as enhancing discoverability and visibility, ORCID reduces duplication of authorship records…

Peer-Review Integrity stamps…and other measures of quality – CrossMark, FundRef,

etc.

We are also now finalising processes for easily recording author disclosures of interest at the article level.

And if editors have any concerns about the originality of submitted papers we can now run these through CrossCheck, publisher-coordinated originality checking service that uses iThenticate software.

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Here are a number of other best-practice recommendations in dealing with

complaints about misconduct…

Be careful of the language that you use.

Consult T&F staff.

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So, how then can journal editors responsibly to maximise impact for their journals?

There is a top 10 list of recommendations in the brochure supplied today, and I am going to quickly touch on a few of these key points in more detail here…

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