Stepping into the future and moving beyond fear
The current scholarly publishing landscape is filled with fear. Many are wary of emerging technologies that promise a more efficient academic ecosystem while also threatening to change the way our industry functions. The pressure to publish is growing and the peer review system is under immense strain. Fraud and misconduct issues are increasing and faith in science is faltering. Societies and publishers are searching for new strategies and structures to drive sustainable growth in the scientific landscape.
There’s so much change and uncertainty in the air, and finding a path forward can be tricky, with the potential for one wrong move to cause irreparable damage to an organization’s reputation or financial security. Recently, Clarivate’s Web of Science delisted 50 academic journals, including many of the world's top publishers. How can your community innovate and drive change when even prominent academic journals are facing costly consequences due to a lack of quality control and research integrity measures?
With the right tools at work, your community can pave a clear and sustainable path forward. We can’t sacrifice quality for quantity, but disruptive technologies can help organizations publish more research in a faster, smarter, and more effective way.
Yes, the future looks unclear and digital transformation can be scary. But, it’s time for publishers to move beyond fear, taking the best elements of the latest tools to ensure that they don’t get left behind. Read on to learn how.
Avoiding the costly consequences of retractions
Amidst the current cost of living crisis, prices are rising across all industries, and scholarly publishing is no exception. As readership and subscription rates decline and some societies struggle to keep membership renewal rates up, associations are searching for sustainable ways to create revenue in our changing landscape, from OA revenue to new member offerings. In this kind of environment, unnecessary expenses are the last thing anyone needs.
Yet, if your organization fails to take the steps needed to ensure that high-quality research is shared, you may find yourself at the receiving end of expensive retractions. Journal article retractions severely damage the prestige of scholarly publications, leading to fewer citations, lower impact factors, fewer submissions, and limiting future possibilities like corporate sponsorships. Retracted research doesn’t just mean wasted time and funding for societies, but it also threatens their public image in an industry where esteem is everything.
With the right innovations, these unexpected financial burdens can be alleviated. Automated workflows built directly into the research process can flag fraudulent and error-filled documents as soon as authors submit them so that editors can be aware of issues before they go on to damage their society’s credibility and financial possibilities.
Building your community and maintaining membership
The current research ecosystem is growing more complex and harder to navigate by the day. How can researchers find the courage to share their ideas in a world where scientific fraud cases continue to make headlines?
The negative reputations that plague societies in the wake of article retractions might even deter members from joining. Imagine missing out on the latest cutting-edge breakthroughs coming from the future leaders of your discipline due to poor vetting practices.
Authors are constantly looking for ways to exhibit and find support for the highest research standards, but being bogged down with technical tasks can cause them to overlook key industry requirements like suitable manuscript lengths. Researchers are losing trust in their institutions to detect these kinds of errors and have expressed a growing desire to take integrity into their own hands. By offering automated checks, your society can build a positive reputation that will entice scholars from different backgrounds to join your community. Your organization can compete with competitors in your discipline by offering members something invaluable: peace of mind and the ability to submit their research with confidence so that they can focus on the work that truly matters to them.
Identifying AI authors
One of the biggest threats to research integrity today are the new “authors” who promise increased efficiency yet lack nuance, experience, and a human touch.
AI writing tools are becoming increasingly prevalent to reduce administrative burdens for researchers and help make the research process much more simplified, speedy, and streamlined. After all, why spend months writing a research paper when you can ask a bot like Chat GPT to outline your ideas in just a few seconds?
Yet the publishing community is largely against using AI to do more than just polish or edit work because of its tendency to “present false information as truth.” AI is becoming so human-like these days that it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what is artificially generated, as we’ve seen through the viral baffling photo of Pope Francis. How can your society meet industry standards and filter out work that is entirely authored by AI tools?
Take the best parts of AI and use it to enhance publishing workflows. Through innovative features like automated submission checks, societies can be automatically notified of plagiarism, misinformation, and strange phrasing, which are tell-tales of AI authorship. These automated checks can help your organization stay ahead of the latest publishing trends and emerging integrity threats to protect your reputation.
Keeping track of poor research practices further upstream
Researchers hear it constantly: in the academic community you either “publish or perish.” This mentality is resulting in bad science at a more widespread level as misconduct and retractions rise. With more and more individuals cutting corners, poor research practices like citation manipulation are growing in frequency to build authors’ reputations and increase exposure to their work.
By using technology to check for integrity, your society can keep track of these issues earlier in the research lifecycle to remove these bad actors and the consequences they may reap within your community earlier on. Easily detect over-citation and avoid the damage it may cause to your society’s reputation with tools that are purpose-built to promote the highest standards of integrity.
Conclusion
The future of research integrity starts with innovative, robust workflows and early-stage research.
Morressier’s transformative workflows can help your society build an iron-clad shield around its reputation, bolstering revenue streams and membership rates, instead of facing fraud cases and declining interest.
We want to empower authors to submit their highest quality work, confident that it's ready for publication. That's why we've launched Submission Checks, so we can speed up the publishing process and give societies more time to focus on finding the highest quality relevant research for your journals. See how your authors can benefit from this service today.
