BACKGROUND:This paper examines responses to data-sharing requests from authors in the Social Sciences. Compliance with requests for data-sharing in Medical Sciences has been reported to be low. The study extends the scholarship by assessing compliance with similar requests in the Social Sciences. METHODS:Four hundred empirical study authors from 400 Q1 Scopus-indexed Journals across eight prominent fields of the Social Sciences were requested to share the research data. Only those authors were contacted who had stated that data would be made available on request, or those who had not explicitly denied data-sharing. RESULTS:Sixty-seven authors responded, of whom 15 (4%) provided data, while 52 declined to share data on grounds such as privacy concerns. The response rate of 4% was far lower than the average of 12% reported in Medical Sciences. CONCLUSIONS:While policy encourages data-sharing, practice has yet to catch up. Existing literature indicates various reasons for not sharing research data. These include unavailability, privacy concerns, ethical concerns, lack of publisher compulsion, and others. It is important to address the issue of authors not responding to requests despite a promise. Policymakers also need to examine this issue to identify ways to improve data-sharing and promote open science.
BACKGROUND:Despite the proliferation of AI disclosure requirements in academic publishing, recent research suggests a persistent gap between policy expectations and research practice. However, little is known about how researchers perceive and navigate these requirements or what limitations they identify in current disclosure practices. METHOD:This study explored researchers' experiences with AI disclosure through semi-structured interviews with 14 researchers from two interdisciplinary fields, bioinformatics and computational social science. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. RESULTS:Four thematic groupings emerged: fragmented and inconsistently enforced requirements; systemic limitations, including scope ambiguity, research integrity risks, and structural disincentives to honest reporting; researcher perspectives on more effective disclosure practices; and disciplinary variation as a cross-cutting dimension shaping how these issues are experienced across research communities. The findings suggest that the compliance gap reflects an interaction between structural conditions and ethical obligations. This gap is sustained by self-reporting mechanisms that lack verification capacity, a transparency paradox in which honest disclosure can invite professional penalization, and disciplinary norms that resist uniform governance approaches. CONCLUSIONS:The study provides empirical evidence supporting the development of a structured AI contribution taxonomy as a more principled and practical alternative to existing disclosure practices. More broadly, the findings suggest that effective AI disclosure governance should incorporate field-sensitive adaptation rather than relying on uniform implementation across diverse research communities.
BACKGROUND:Human brain organoids have attracted increasing attention for their potential to model human brain development and neurological disorders. However, concerns about their possible consciousness have generated ongoing ethical debate. In situations where scientific evidence remains uncertain but the possibility of serious moral harm cannot be excluded, the precautionary principle has been proposed as a framework for ethical governance. METHODS:This article critically examines the applicability of the precautionary principle to human brain organoid research through normative analysis. It clarifies core normative elements of precautionary principle and evaluates its relevance to emerging ethical challenges in brain organoid research. RESULTS:The analysis identifies several major governance challenges, including the epistemic limitations of similarity-based inference, tensions between evidentiary standards and precautionary obligations, and the risks of ethics dumping. These problems reveal broader governance gaps rather than theoretical disagreements, underscoring the need for institutional adaptation in advance of definitive scientific evidence. CONCLUSIONS:The article argues that precautionary governance in human brain organoid research should avoid both excessive restriction and ethical complacency. It proposes strategies including dynamic and graded regulation, proportionality-based safeguards, and stronger international coordination. These approaches aim to balance ethical vigilance with responsible scientific innovation in a rapidly evolving field.
In the context of escalating authorship inflation and growing concern about research integrity, this article examines sole authorship as an epistemically and ethically grounded methodological condition within specific forms of contemplative and conceptual scholarship. Focusing on forms of inquiry in which interpretation constitutes the primary analytic process, I argue that sole authorship supports a continuous and traceable interpretive arc, central to epistemic integrity. In such contexts, continuity of interpretation not only enables conceptual coherence but also underpins ethical accountability by ensuring that responsibility for interpretive decisions remains clearly identifiable across the analytic process. Framed as a contemplative method grounded in mindful solitude, understood as an intentional orientation toward inward integration, sole authorship is situated within contemplative psychology and extended to methodologies such as Intuitive Inquiry, heuristic inquiry, hermeneutic phenomenology, and autoethnography, where interpretive validity depends on a sustained authorial perspective. While collaborative research remains essential across many domains, this article identifies conditions under which a unified authorial voice provides methodological advantages not fully reproduced through distributed authorship. The argument is therefore not that sole authorship offers a general solution, but that it functions as a context-specific stance aligned with the epistemic and ethical demands of contemplative scholarship.
Holcombe et al. (2026) propose practical mechanisms for making specific non-author research contributions more visible through ORCID identifiers, CRediT information, manuscript submission systems, and JATS-XML metadata. We support this aim but argue that its implementation requires a clearer distinction between two questions: how substantive contributions should be formally credited, and how broadly authors may acknowledge the human relationships and circumstances underlying scholarly work. We propose two complementary categories: a structured Contributor Listing for machine-readable author and non-author contributions and narrative Acknowledgments for gratitude and contextual recognition. This distinction would advance visibility and accountability without allowing the standardization of contributor credit to become the standardization of gratitude.
Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is increasingly becoming a site for international research to examine global climate change, biodiversity, deposits of rare earth elements, and various existing health disparities. Yet, there is no comprehensive code of ethical guidelines for responsible and culturally centered research there. International researchers conducting research in Kalaallit Nunaat are bound by research ethics regulations governed their home countries and institutions, but these are varied and, perhaps most importantly, were established independently of Kalaallit (Greenlanders). Consequently, in many cases, research in Kalaallit Nunaat has failed to benefit or prioritize populations there and, in some cases, has caused unintended harms. Here we provide an overview of some of the problems that have resulted from research in Kalaallit Nunaat. These problems were identified from 27 listening sessions held across Kalaallit Nunaat with community members, municipality leaders, and researchers over a five-year period (2020-2025). The themes that arose reveal certain key limitations with applying Western research ethics policies to the Kalaallit Nunaat context. Specifically, such policies tend to neglect research equity, reflect an individualistic rights-based framework of ethics that is limiting, and presuppose that only humans deserve moral consideration.
BACKGROUND:Predatory conferences (PCs) scam researchers by compromising them financially and professionally. This study presents the empirical development of the Pre-Attendance Conference Evaluator (PACE) to help academics assess a conference's legitimacy. MATERIALS AND METHOD:An expert group of six academics validated a preliminary list of PC traits. After identifying latent constructs through pilot testing, the list underwent four iterations based on statistical factor loadings to assess reliability, predictive validity, and concurrent validity. Later, confirmatory factor analysis included a battery of model-fit indices to assess the scale's dimensionality. RESULTS:Content validity ratio and semi-structured interviews reduced the number of PC traits from 70 to 29. Cronbach's alpha and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test indicated 15 items suitable for factor analysis. Parallel analysis of pilot-testing data from 800 conference-level observations revealed the scale's unidimensionality. Eventually, 11 items showed strong factor loadings and a high fit across model indices. Concurrent validity assessed by 616 conference-level observations showed high correlations (rs = 0.73-0.80) with existing tools. High predictive validity (>0.9) and test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.47-0.68) indicated moderate-to-good temporal stability. The ROC analysis yielded a cutoff score of < 14 to deem a conference predatory. CONCLUSION:PACE demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability as a tool for diagnosing potentially predatory conferences.
BACKGROUND:Dual-use research of concern (DURC) refers to legitimate scientific research that, if misapplied, could cause significant harm. Journal editors play an important role in ensuring that disseminated research does not pose unacceptable risks to society. We conducted a thematic analysis of DURC policies adopted by life science journals. METHODS:Top 10 journals listed in Google Scholar Metrics (February 2026) across 15 life science categories yielded 133 journals after de-duplication. Each journal's website was screened for a policy addressing DURC, biosafety, or biosecurity. Following de-duplication of policies, a set of unique DURC policies was established. Policies were coded using color-coded identifiers for key stakeholders and actions, and themes were identified through reviewer consensus. RESULTS:Fifty-nine journals (44.36%) had a clear policy addressing DURC, biosafety, or biosecurity. De-duplication yielded 11 distinct policy documents. Thematic analysis revealed five themes: (1) transparency and disclosure; (2) regulatory compliance; (3) editorial oversight and gatekeeping; (4) distributed responsibility; and (5) different definitions of DURC. CONCLUSION:Many life science journals continue to lack explicit DURC policies. Among those with policies, there is a shared expectation that authors, reviewers, and editors are adequately trained to recognize and manage DURC-related risks, an assumption that may be unwarranted.
Should the methodological tools and review protocols required of biomedical researchers become the default for social science meta-researchers? And should these reporoducibility standards then be used to gatekeep and police "methodological expertise?" This seems to be the judgmental sub-text of the Bakker et al commentary on our paper. In this response, we make the case for critical accountability research to cultivate forms of methodological rigor that are aligned with the research questions and design. Our paper, based on a systematic topographical review of research into retraction, sought to show the limits of the existing research base. Our survey highlighted how most existing work was quantitative, rarely interview-based, and often failed to explore why journals and publishers were so slow to retract. There is too little attention to the politics, economics, and sociology of research integrity.
It is an unfortunate reality that metascience and metaresearch are not immune to methodological or reporting issues. Best practices for conducting and reporting evidence syntheses are well-established, and we expect them to be enforced by this journal. Thus, we were surprised to see a recent "systematic review" published in Accountability in Research state that the first article published about retractions was from 1998. As we know of several potentially relevant articles published prior to 1998, we looked deeper into the review and its methodology. Because of the methodological and reporting flaws throughout the review, which we describe in this commentary, the conclusions it presents overstate the certainty and completeness of the findings, and the review includes inaccuracies. That these issues were seemingly not addressed prior to publication highlights the importance of involving individuals with methodological expertise, including search expertise, in the review process, and the necessity of adhering to the appropriate reporting guidelines to ensure accuracy, credibility, and reproducibility. We call on Accountability in Research to ensure that evidence syntheses are peer reviewed by individuals with appropriate methodological expertise; to ensure that authors are adhering to appropriate reporting guidelines; and to consider requiring study preregistration and presubmission inquiries for evidence syntheses.
BACKGROUND:In response to widespread concerns about research integrity, recent years have seen numerous efforts to safeguard against research misconduct and questionable research practices. Research-performing organizations are among the key actors involved in implementing such efforts. However, little is known about the effectiveness of organizational policy initiatives. METHODS AND MATERIALS:In this study, we investigate the ability of organizations to change researchers' behavior through the perspective of the researcher. We analyze data from the International Research Integrity Survey (IRIS), a survey of researchers in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the USA. We specifically investigate whether researchers' perceptions of their organizations' research integrity policies relate to the degree to which they engage in questionable research practices. RESULTS:We find that awareness of policies, evaluations of the effectiveness of policies, as well as confidence in their organizations' research integrity policies all relate to lower levels of engagement in questionable research practices. However, we also find that this relationship is highly sensitive to both researchers' research integrity self-confidence and their general attitudes toward research integrity. CONCLUSIONS:As such, while findings indicate that organizations' policy efforts can influence researcher behavior, this influence is contingent on researcher acceptance and empowerment.
Contemporary medical knowledge is generated within two interconnected economies that are often examined separately. First, the publishing market has become increasingly oligopolistic, transforming unpaid academic labour and public funding into substantial profits through subscription models and article processing charges. Second, a parallel clinical research economy has emerged around industry-sponsored trials, where per-patient payments and investigator fees can create a shadow profession that provides both income and prestige to physicians. This article argues that these systems do not merely coexist but mutually reinforce and obscure one another. The normalization of industry-mediated clinical advantages weakens awareness of publisher-mediated extraction, while the opacity of publishing finances renders the incentive structures of clinical trials ethically unremarkable. Using the metaphor of "mud" to describe the gradual internalization of structural distortions, the article examines how silence emerges at the intersection of prestige dependence, organizational conflicts of interest, and the entrepreneurial transformation of academic identity. Finally, it proposes practical individual-, institutional-, and policy-level measures, including greater transparency regarding trial-related income and support for community-governed publishing models, to strengthen ethical visibility and accountability in medical research.
The concept of a moral shame associated with the disclosure of artificial intelligence (AI) use in research, as articulated by Bao and Zeng ("AI disclosure, moral shame, and the punishment of honesty. Accountability in Research, https://doi-org/10.1080/08989621.2025.2542197) is in line with other related notions such as AI guilt, and calls for improvements in AI-use policies and guidelines. Here, I note a potentially paradoxical nature of such moral shame, which I would argue is somewhat in tension with simply being honest. From both research integrity or social epistemological perspectives, moral shame associated with AI-used could be a misconception on the part of the individual that arises from 1) a poor grasp of research integrity and/or 2) an epistemic failure to recognize AI writing assistants for what they really are. These two sources of misconception would need addressing.
BACKGROUND:Early notification of journal readers of the existence of publication integrity concerns by an editorial expression of concern (EoC) can mitigate the adverse effects of unreliable research. METHODS:We extracted EoCs and retraction notices from the Retraction Watch database up until the end of 2024. We assessed temporal trends in publication of each notice, the proportion of retracted papers with an associated EoC, and the timing of EoCs according to publication date and retraction status. We examined the ratio of EoCs to retractions among authors, including those with multiple retractions, and among both journals and publishers. RESULTS:EoCs were rarely published during the 14y assessment period. Only 3.3% of retracted papers had a preceding EoC. For 56% of publications with an EoC, the EoC was the latest notice. 92% of authors had an EoC:retraction ratio < 1. Only 35% of authors with > 5 retractions had an EoC, and 99% had an EoC:retraction ratio < 1. Publication of an EoC was more common in journals which had published > 5 retractions than in those which had published < 5. CONCLUSIONS:EoCs are rarely employed during the assessment of publication integrity concerns. Journal readers are disadvantaged by delayed notification of potentially unreliable research.
Despite growing scholarly attention to both research integrity issues and predatory publishing, the phenomenon of retraction in potential predatory journals (PPJs), especially reasons for retraction, remains underexplored. Drawing on the revived Beall's List and the Retraction Watch Database, we identified 16 direct and three indirect reasons for 717 PPJ retractions. The indirect reasons reflected institutional investigations by three stakeholder groups: journal authorities (editors and publishers), research institutions, and research integrity overseers. Fourteen direct reasons were author-related, with five involving content issues and eight concerning broader breaches of research integrity. Another author-related direct reason was retracting to publish elsewhere, accounting for 60.1% of all PPJ retractions. The two non-author direct reasons involved errors made by journal authorities and third parties. PPJ retractions in the Natural Sciences covered all direct retraction reasons, whereas those in the Humanities and Social Sciences involved only four, and cross-disciplinary retractions involved five. The 10 countries with the most retractions for direct reasons contributed 86.5% of the total, with seven Asian countries (Malaysia, China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Thailand) representing 72.2%. Some direct retraction reasons were significantly associated with disciplinary groupings and/or primary affiliation countries.
BACKGROUND:Public trust in research depends in part on the capacity of the system to detect and correct errors in the research record. In Australia, this task is largely entrusted to research institutions through a self-regulatory framework. The present article seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations about whether the Australian framework is fit for purpose. METHODS:Here, we assemble and analyze two sources of information that appear not to have been previously analyzed: research misconduct investigation policies at Australian Group of Eight universities (a group of Australian universities that purport to be its leading research-intensive universities) and published decisions and appeals arising from workplace disputes involving allegations of research misconduct. RESULTS:Together, these materials support existing concerns that universities are not adopting robust policies regarding reporting findings of misconduct and correcting the record, and that they sometimes fail to follow their own policies. CONCLUSION:Claims that the current self-regulatory approach is sufficient are not supported by our evidence. These findings provide a foundation for reform, including revisions to the existing guidelines and the creation of an independent oversight body with adequate enforcement powers.
BACKGROUND:Open Access (OA) agreements were introduced to remove financial barriers to scientific dissemination and promote equity in knowledge access. As Article Processing Charges (APCs) have shifted from individual researchers to institutions, access to OA publishing has become an institutional asset, unevenly distributed across institutions, countries, and career stages. PURPOSE:This article introduces and defines value extraction in OA - the use of access to APC coverage as leverage to obtain authorship or corresponding authorship without proportional intellectual contribution - and examines it as a structurally enabled integrity risk distinct from previously described forms of authorship abuse. APPROACH:We conduct a conceptual and normative analysis of the mechanisms by which OA agreements interact with metric-driven academic evaluation systems and existing research integrity frameworks, identifying governance gaps and distributional inequities produced by these interactions. FINDINGS:Value extraction in OA is enabled by the convergence of three factors: centralized APC control within institutions, performance metrics that privilege publication counts and corresponding authorship, and integrity frameworks that treat publishing infrastructure as an ethically neutral background condition. Researchers at less-resourced institutions, early-career researchers, and scholars in the Global South face heightened vulnerability. Existing authorship guidelines fail to address mechanisms in which infrastructural access - rather than hierarchy or prestige - functions as leverage for academic credit. CONCLUSIONS:Safeguards are needed at institutional, publisher, and systemic levels, including procedural firewalls between APC decisions and authorship documentation, publisher-level monitoring of authorship patterns, and reform of evaluation frameworks to decouple infrastructural access from academic credit. Future research should investigate the prevalence of value extraction using bibliometric and network-based screening approaches.
BACKGROUND:In efforts to improve replication rates across sciences, graduate student training can foster an understanding of best practices. One consideration is to identify the psychological underpinnings that motivate early-career researchers to avoid questionable research practices (QRPs) and engage in transparent research behaviors. Recent findings demonstrate efficacy by leveraging identificatory processes, or how researchers identify with ethical science. This study examined whether the extent to which individuals incorporate ethical scientific principles into their identities can motivate disinterest in QRPs. METHOD:As part of a baseline data collection effort for a systemic ethics training program at a Carnegie R1 institute, graduate students provided initial measures assessing endorsement of scientific values as outlined by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and the extent to which those values are part of their identity. They also reported their perceptions of the defensibility of various QRPs, and their willingness to engage in them. RESULTS:Greater endorsement of NASEM values was associated with less endorsement of QRPs. This association was mediated by inclusion of these values in one's own identity. Results provide initial evidence for how institutes can foster psychological profiles of an ethical researcher in developing training modules for graduate students.
BACKGROUND:Despite the importance of showcasing research achievements and safeguarding research integrity, our understanding of how Chinese universities navigate these potentially competing priorities remains limited. METHODS:In response, this study investigated 579 Chinese universities on the 2024 Stanford lists of the world's top 2% scientists (WTSs) and operationalized their fulfillment of the dual priorities in terms of institutional visibility (i.e. public institutional responses to the release of the 2024 Stanford lists of WTSs and to the government requirements for safeguarding research integrity) and institutional responsiveness (i.e. promptness in publishing news reports featuring WTSs and releasing annual research integrity reports). In this connection, three types of publicly accessible official documents were analyzed: 1) news reports featuring WTSs, 2) academic integrity webpages, and 3) annual research integrity reports disclosing integrity investigations. RESULTS:Among these universities, 28.5% published news reports featuring WTSs, 52.8% maintained academic integrity webpages, and 16.8% released annual research integrity reports. Furthermore, significant variations were found across four contextual factors: university prestige (elite universities vs. non-elite universities), retraction status (universities hosting retraction-afflicted WTSs vs. universities hosting retraction-free WTSs), the number of WTSs, and the prevalence of retraction-afflicted WTSs.
INTRODUCTION:Is it plagiarism if the material was previously published by a third party (other than the claimant)? This scenario is of interest as a model for an assertion that involves the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry. METHODS:A survey was conducted on whether (a) there should be a statute of limitations on allegations of plagiarism and (b) an allegation of plagiarism should be deemed unfounded, unsubstantiated, or not proven when the alleged plagiarized ideas, processes, results, or words had been previously published in the scientific literature by an individual other than the alleged victim of the claimed plagiarism. RESULTS:We received 287 complete responses. In all the survey questions but one, that dealing with statute of limitations on claims of plagiarism ("No"), a range of responses were obtained. About 40% of the respondents considered that unacknowledged communication of another's unoriginal ideas to be plagiarism, even when the content being alleged to have been plagiarized had been previously published by a third party and that the claimant acknowledged that they were aware of that previous disclosure by a third party. CONCLUSIONS:Two major recommendations were made: education in RCR should be required for both students and faculty; and the evidentiary standard for establishing research misconduct should be increased.
