Under repair: A publication ethics and research record in the making

Scholarly Publishing, Boundary Processes, and the Problem of Fake Peer Reviews

Over the past decade, the phenomenon of "fake" peer reviews has caused growing consternation among scholarly publishers. Yet despite the significant behind-the-scenes impact that anxieties about fakery have had on peer review processes within scholarly journals, the phenomenon itself has been subject to little scholarly analysis. Rather than treating fake reviews as a straightforward descriptive category, in this article, we explore how the discourse on fake reviews emerged and why, and what it tells us about its seeming antithesis, "genuine" peer review. Our primary source of data are two influential adjudicators of scholarly publishing integrity that have been critical to the emergence of the concept of the fake review: Retraction Watch and the Committee on Publication Ethics. Via an analysis of their respective blog posts, Forum cases, presentations, and best practice guidance, we build a genealogy of the fake review discourse and highlight the variety of players involved in staking out the fake. We conclude that constant work is required to maintain clear lines of separation between genuine and fake reviews and highlight how the concept has served to reassert the boundaries between science and society in a context where they have increasingly been questioned.

Ethics governance development: The case of the Menlo Report

The 2012 Menlo Report was an effort in which a group of computer scientists, US government funders, and lawyers produced ethics guidelines for research in information and communications technology (ICT). Here we study Menlo as a case of what we call ethics governance in the making, finding that this process examines past controversies and enrols existing networks to connect the everyday practice of ethics with ethics as a form of governance. To create the Menlo Report, authors and funders relied on bricolage work with existing, available resources, which significantly shaped both the report's contents and impacts. Report authors were motivated by both forward- and backward-looking goals: enabling new data-sharing as well as addressing past controversies and their implications for the field's body of research. Authors also grappled with uncertainty about which ethical frameworks were appropriate and made the decision to classify much network data as human subjects data. Finally, the Menlo Report authors attempted to enrol multiple existing networks in governance through appeals to local research communities as well as taking steps towards federal rulemaking. The Menlo Report serves as a case study in how to study ethics governance in the making: with attention to resources, adaptation, and bricolage, and with a focus on both the uncertainties the process tries to repair, as well as the new uncertainties the process uncovers, which will become the site of future ethics work.

Innovating editorial practices: academic publishers at work

Background

Triggered by a series of controversies and diversifying expectations of editorial practices, several innovative peer review procedures and supporting technologies have been proposed. However, adoption of these new initiatives seems slow. This raises questions about the wider conditions for peer review change and about the considerations that inform decisions to innovate. We set out to study the structure of commercial publishers’ editorial process, to reveal how the benefits of peer review innovations are understood, and to describe the considerations that inform the implementation of innovations.

Methods

We carried out field visits to the editorial office of two large academic publishers housing the editorial staff of several hundreds of journals, to study their editorial process, and interviewed editors not affiliated with large publishers. Field notes were transcribed and analysed using coding software.

Results

At the publishers we analysed, the decision-making structure seems to show both clear patterns of hierarchy and layering of the different editorial practices. While information about new initiatives circulates widely, their implementation depends on assessment of stakeholder’s wishes, impact on reputation, efficiency and implementation costs, with final decisions left to managers at the top of the internal hierarchy. Main tensions arise between commercial and substantial arguments. The editorial process is closely connected to commercial practices of creating business value, and the very specific terms in which business value is understood, such as reputation considerations and the urge to increase efficiency. Journals independent of large commercial publishers tend to have less hierarchically structured processes, report more flexibility to implement innovations, and to a greater extent decouple commercial and editorial perspectives.

Conclusion

Our study demonstrates that peer review innovations are partly to be understood in light of commercial considerations related to reputation, efficiency and implementations costs. These arguments extend beyond previously studied topics in publishing economics, including publishers’ choice for business or publication models and reach into the very heart of the editorial and peer review process.

The Legal Consequences of Research Misconduct: False Investigators and Grant Proposals

In a survey on research misconduct, roughly 20% of the respondents admitted that they have submitted federal grant proposals that include scholars as research participants even though those scholars were not expected to contribute to the research effort. This manuscript argues that adding such false investigators is illegal, violating multiple federal statutes including the False Statements Act (18 U.S.C. §1001), the False Claims Act (31 U.S.C. §3729), and False, Fictitious, or Fraudulent Claims (18 U.S.C. §287). Moreover, it is not only the offending academics and the false investigators that face civil and criminal penalties because administrators may also be liable if they sign off on proposals and are in a position to know that false investigators might be included. Policy recommendations that should reduce the use of false investigators include changing institutional cultures, better training and oversight of the responsible conduct of research, and, most importantly, making all grant reviews double blind.

Academic lives and cultures

The current themed issue came about by chance. A number of manuscripts examining academic lives and cultures came through Social Studies of Science's review process at roughly the same time, and have been grouped together here. This introduction briefly describes some of their themes, and connects them with some other articles recently published in this journal, to broaden virtually the themed issue so as to represent some of the current work on the topic.

Rethinking gaming: The ethical work of optimization in web search engines

When measures come to matter, those measured find themselves in a precarious situation. On the one hand, they have a strong incentive to respond to measurement so as to score a favourable rating. On the other hand, too much of an adjustment runs the risk of being flagged and penalized by system operators as an attempt to 'game the system'. Measures, the story goes, are most useful when they depict those measured as they usually are and not how they intend to be. In this article, I explore the practices and politics of optimization in the case of web search engines. Drawing on materials from ethnographic fieldwork with search engine optimization (SEO) consultants in the United Kingdom, I show how maximizing a website's visibility in search results involves navigating the shifting boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' optimization. Specifically, I am interested in the ethical work performed as SEO consultants artfully arrange themselves to cope with moral ambiguities provoked and delegated by the operators of the search engine. Building on studies of ethics as a practical accomplishment, I suggest that the ethicality of optimization has itself become a site of governance and contestation. Studying such practices of 'being ethical' not only offers opportunities for rethinking popular tropes like 'gaming the system', but also draws attention to often-overlooked struggles for authority at the margins of contemporary ranking schemes.