A community-led strengthening of research integrity

The Elsevier service is currently being tested with a select number of publishers and is expected to be rolled out to all participating publishers later this year.

The power of community

The sheer scale of the problem has brought the scientific community together in a new way, realising that only by working together and sharing resources can they turn the tide. There are already more than 100 volunteers among STM members working on the discovery, which Dr Van Rossum sees as an important sign of the community’s commitment and potential for growth.

The strength of the community is a key resource and a significant success for publishers who have previously worked in silos and shared little information. It is precisely this way of working that has allowed publishers to approach several publishers at once, even though they knew that they did not share information about submissions with each other.

Building trust is difficult, acknowledged Dr Van Rossum. It is easier to build trust in smaller communities and more difficult in the new, larger global community where contributions are accumulating from new and often largely unknown sources.

For Dr. Van Rossum, the solution lies in further increasing collaboration and strengthening the community so that publishers large and small can share and benefit from the latest technologies.

“The most important achievement is the engagement,” he said. “It’s the more than 40 organizations and the large number of people participating in the Integrity Hub. It’s the willingness to share information. It’s the willingness to share technology in a truly collaborative way.”

STM Solutions is well positioned to act as a natural forum for the community, said Dr. Van Rossum:

For publishers to share content – confidential content – they need a trusted environment and STM Solutions can cover that environment. Because we are the operational arm of a global association whose goal is to advance trusted research, there is trust in our systems and in our teams and our technology to achieve that.

He would like to see more publishers join the hub, especially smaller organisations that may not have the capacity to set up their own integrity checking systems but can benefit from knowledge sharing among the larger players.