IEEE Publishing Ethics Team Upholds Research Integrity

Given a rising number of publishing misconduct allegations, IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEEE volunteers write new policies.

Here are some highlights of the team’s activities last year.

New detection tools

IEEE conducted a pilot program in 2024 to integrate tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access. The multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal publishes research results across all IEEE fields of interest.

STM created the hub so scholarly publishers could access a suite of integrated, commercial, third-party research integrity tools as well as those developed by STM Solutions. The tools help the publishing group avoid printing problematic content upon manuscript receipt, rather than reacting postpublication.

The new features include the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, which helps identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts at submission. Another is an integration with the PubPeer database, which allows users to check whether references in a manuscript have received previous PubPeer comments or have been retracted—both of which can indicate quality or integrity issues. The duplicate submissions detector can determine whether the same manuscript has been submitted to multiple journals by different publishers, often a sign of academic “paper mill” activity.

Following the success of the pilot, IEEE began working last year to expand the services to all its periodicals. It is anticipated that all IEEE periodicals will be included in the Integrity Hub screening by the end of this year.

Raising visibility

The team participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It also renewed membership in groups including the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the team continued its work…