Morressier partners with imagetwin to provide powerful AI-based image analysis to protect research integrity in life sciences

Berlin, London, and Washington DC, February 8, 2024 – Morressier, the Berlin-based startup transforming scholarly communications, today announced its partnership with imagetwin. Under the partnership, Morressier’s workflows now feature automated analysis of scientific images, providing editors and peer reviewers with tools to detect potential issues such as plagiarism and manipulation, early and at scale.

Images used for the communication of research in the life sciences, from western blots to microscopy and x-ray scattering images, are increasingly prone to copying and manipulation. The problem is so bad that integrity sleuth Elisabeth Bik declared that Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem. 

Dr. Bik and other volunteers in the life-science community, such as David Sholto, who recently identified issues with research at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, have been successfully offering crowdsourced analysis to identify potential issues with scientific images and raising awareness of integrity issues in the life sciences. However, the scale and rate of publication in the field means that fraudulent or sloppy research inevitably slips through the submissions process and ultimately enters the scientific record. 

Leveraging recent advances in machine learning, imagetwin can now automatically and rapidly perform deep analysis of images, providing editors and peer-reviewers with signals at the very moment that they are assessing research and making editorial decisions. 

imagetwin’s state-of-the-art technologies are now available in Morressier’s Integrity Manager as well as across its workflows for proceedings, and will be available in its manuscript submission system which is currently under development.

“Image manipulation is a massive threat to research integrity in the life-science community,” said Sami Benchekroun, Morressier co-founder and CEO. “imagetwin’s powerful AI-based image fraud detection is the perfect addition to the integrity checks Morressier offers, from identifying suspicious citation patterns to paper-mill detection. The academic publishing community now has the tools it needs to rip out scientific fraud at the root.”

"We are delighted to build a partnership with a strong player like Morressier to make our software available to a bigger audience," said imagetwin CEO and co-founder Patrick Starke. “Image manipulation is a growing problem and it is vital to get these AI-based tools into the hands of those making editorial decisions so that they can really have an impact on the integrity of research outputs.”

About Morressier

Morressier provides societies and publishers with workflows for transforming scholarly communications. Driven by a mission to accelerate scientific breakthroughs, it is headquartered in Berlin and has offices in London and Washington DC.

About imagetwin

imagetwin is a startup based in Vienna, Austria that produces AI-based software for detecting integrity issues in figures of scientific articles.

Contact

Dan Noyes, Morressier Head of Communications: press@morressier.com 

References

• Harvard Professor’s Papers Contain Copied Images, Says Science Sleuth, Wall Street Journal, Feb 1, 2024

• Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem, New York Times, Oct 29, 2022

• ‘A lot of it is sloppiness’: the biologist who finds flaws in scientific papers, Guardian, Jan 29, 2024

• There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit, Guardian, Aug 9, 2023