Addressing Research Integrity with Identity Verification

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.