Guidance

• Case

  On-going

  How to handle offers of promotion of authorship for sale

  2023

  …cross-checked for duplicate submission using tools like those being developed by STM. This would provide evidence which could lead to an industry response.  It seems unlikely that action against individual companies will be of much utility, even if it were possible, as more will surface rapidly. Young researchers in particular are often unaware of the status and intentions of these services, and may…
• Seminars and webinars

  Publication misconduct tools

  …knowledge of publication misconduct. STM operates via working groups, task forces, and a governance Board, and their focus is on the source of integrity issues. The Paper Mill Checker tool carries out on-demand screening using eight signals of paper mill activity, including other external tools such as PubPeer and Clearskies. The Duplicate Submission Checker, which is at the pilot stage, operates as an…
• Case

  Case Closed

  Nuisance author

  2010

  …happened at his end. The editor has since quietly removed his duplicate submissions from the system.…
• Case

  Contacting Research Ethics Committees with concerns over studies

  2002

  …explicit. _ Authors may not be aware of this fact and some rely on a lack of communication between journals to perpetrate duplicate submission and publication. _ It is usually the case that where the author is open about papers and their submission to another journal, that there are legitimate reasons to send the other papers elsewhere and sufficient differences in the papers to justify separate…
• Case

  On-going

  Ethical concerns about a study involving human subjects

  2013

  …informed the editor of that journal of the duplicate submission and his concerns. Follow up (June 2014): After the relevant governmental department agreed to investigate, the manuscript was rejected by the journal. The journal did not receive a response from the editor of the other journal in which the article had been published.…
• Forum discussion topics

  Ethical considerations around book publishing

  …want to submit their book proposal to multiple different publishers in parallel because publishers can offer different packages to authors. This is different from journals where duplicate submission is not acceptable. Back to top
• Forum discussion topics

  Ethical considerations around watchlists

  …tactics. A key challenge is to share information ethically in a way which allows journals and institutions to identify suspicious behaviour in advance of submission. The STM Integrity Hub’s Duplicate Submission Tracker is a tool to identify when authors submit the same paper to more than one journal or publisher. The Integrity Hub…
• Forum discussion topics

  Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”

  …experiments. We often become aware of these papers when we are looking into potential problems with duplicate submission. Authors will request withdrawal or will not be contactable if we find they have published elsewhere. Paper mill activity has been largely in the life sciences portfolio but some has been found in engineering journals. We have seen paper mills in other disciplines such as…
• Seminars and webinars

  Webinar 2022: Managing paper mills

  …tool so editors can upload submitted manuscripts and check tem for various signals (soft launch Oct 2022) duplicate submission tool (launch 2023) image alteration and duplication STM Integrity Hub update …

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