Safeguarding Research Integrity: Enhancing Identity Verification and Accountability with RICS

The Research Integrity Checks (RIC) platform addresses a critical gap in scholarly publishing by integrating multiple research integrity tools into a unified platform. Developed by HighWire Press and MPS Labs, RICS offers a comprehensive dashboard that streamlines integrity checks within the DigiCorePro submission system and as a standalone tool. Researcher identity is vital in evaluating research integrity. A key feature of RIC is identity verification, ensuring authenticity of authors, editors, and reviewers throughout the entire publishing process. It validates users by examining data from ORCID IDs, IP addresses, retraction histories, conflicts of interest, funding disclosures and more. By integrating resources like Crossref, Retraction Watch, PubMed and Open Alex, RIC centralizes identity checks, reducing reliance on fragmented tools. With configurable scoring and thresholds, RIC helps detect integrity concerns, maintaining publication quality. By generating XML metadata to document these checks, RIC enhances transparency, trust, and efficiency in research publishing.

Publication Date

May 2025

47th Annual Meeting (2025)

48

Although every year in the scholarly publishing ecosystem is a balancing act of innovation, optimization, and value creation, 2025 is shaping up to be particularly challenging as the pace and scale of change is accelerating more than we’ve ever seen before. There is increasing pressure to provide value to and to meet the incredibly diverse needs of the global research community while maintaining financial health for our own organizations, living our values, and continuing to protect the scholarly record. With AI, open access, integrity, and mistrust frequently dominating the conversation, we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in both our industry and society as a whole. As always, the SSP community continues to focus on bringing together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, researchers and countless others with a communal interest and stake in disseminating scholarly information. We look to the 47th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to continue this tradition and welcome all colleagues and community stakeholders.

Joshua Routh

1

Director of Hosting Solutions, HireWire Press

Tony Alves

2

SVP, Product Management, HighWire Press

Tony ALVES is SVP of Product Management at HighWire Press, the platforms division of MPS Limited, overseeing a suite of platform products addressing the entire scholarly publishing infrastructure, from workflow to hosting to analytics. Tony served as Director of Product Management at Aries Systems, and Publisher at SilverPlatter Education. Tony promotes industry standardization, system-to-system communications and industry shared services, participating in initiatives on peer review, research integrity, PIDs and open science. Serving those interests, Tony volunteers with NISO, STM, Crossref, ORCID, OA Switchboard, CSE and ACSE, he organizes talks, and writes articles and blog posts on these topics.