Most scholarly publishers require little more than a working email address to allow users to submit manuscripts for peer review that can become part of the permanent scientific record. This implicit trust in researcher identities is being exploited in several ways, including authors recommending fake peer reviewers or claiming false co-authors, and researchers using fake identities to become guest editors. This session will explore how and why researcher identity is being exploited in editorial processes, engaging attendees in an open dialog about how our community can tackle these issues. We will present the recommendations of a cross-industry working group for applying more stringent identity verification steps throughout the peer review process. These recommendations reflect the wide disparity in access to technologies across our global community, and provide publishers with a flexible framework to determine the level of risk within their editorial processes, and the verification workflows that are appropriate.

With the proliferation of scholarly content, how do researchers know what to trust? There isn't a single source of truth, and many in the community are looking for support and answers. But there's no single solution, and it's down to us as a community to work together to solve this problem. This session brings together different parts of the community to discuss how their organizations are working together to tackle this challenge and ask the audience to highlight any remaining problems that we need to solve together. We'll hear about Crossref's role in collecting and openly disseminating metadata that can be used as "trust signals," STM," support for publishers to preserve scholarly integrity, Web of Science using the rigorous selection as a foundation for trustworthy datasets & metrics, COPE's work bringing together publishers and institutions, and the Korean Council of Science Editors (KCSE)' work with journal editorial boards.