Analysis and news


Cause and effect Chris Graf asks: what happens to research quality when we change the peer review and the research publishing model?


Complexity, change and co-existence now characterise even the most traditional and conservative things in research publishing, like peer review. This article raises questions about how researchers and publishers, working in the right sorts of collaboration, can maintain essential aspects of quality – namely integrity and ethics – and how they can find new kinds of value, together. Peer review, as part of the peer reviewed publishing process, is how we manage two essential aspects of quality in research and research publishing: integrity, and ethics. By integrity, we mean the reliability, reproducibility, trustworthiness and usefulness of published research. By ethics we mean the regulated ethical requirements for doing research (human and animal research, in particular), as well as equally important community-led obligations (like authorship practices), and how these are reflected and reported in published research. How are we doing with all that, you might


ask? Often, people look to retractions as a


marker for quality in research integrity and publishing ethics. Retractions, for the uninitiated, are formal withdrawals of research articles, published when something is significantly wrong with the integrity or the ethics of a piece of research. Retractions can be for honest errors, or for research misconduct, or for something in between. Jeffrey Brainard published an analysis of records from the world’s largest retraction database, titled Rethinking Retractions in Science. While Brainard reports that the numbers


of retractions grew tenfold in the years between 2000 and 2014, he also reminds us that the total number is actually low (maybe four in every 10,000 articles published) and the number of articles published is also growing (doubling over a similar period). About 40 per cent of the retractions Brainard studied reported honest errors, problems with reproducibility, and other issues. The remainder were for our ‘something in


10 Research Information February/March 2019


“Retractions are… many of us would argue, a sign of ‘quality’ in the research publishing process”


between’ questionable research practices, or for misconduct. Brainard quotes Nick Steneck (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor): ‘Retractions have increased because editorial practices are improving, and journals are trying to encourage editors to take retractions seriously.’ Retractions are, Brainard, Steneck and


many of us would argue, a sign of ‘quality’ in the research publishing process. They’re published when research publishers, using their ‘trade’ peer-reviewed publishing processes, curate (per their promise to the world) the research they publish to ensure it is a reliable as it can be. Retractions give us a sign that publishers are working with researchers when problems arise, either


with integrity or with ethics (or with both), to address those problems in a robust and increasingly transparent way. But our trad peer-reviewed publishing


process is evolving, fast; completely new peer review models are emerging. ‘Author-mediated peer review’ is one quite profound evolution, akin to discussions for many years about post-publication peer review. Wellcome Open Research is a research publishing platform maintained by the Wellcome Trust. Authors submit their work to it, and after rapid quality checks and screening, including for our essential integrity and ethics qualities, the author’s research is published immediately. After publication the author is


incentivised to get their work peer reviewed (for example, only work that is peer reviewed is then indexed in PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central). They pick and invite the reviewers. If the author fails to get it peer reviewed (and positively peer reviewed) then it likely sits on the platform (and probably doesn’t ever get read). And then, further, the authors


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