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The STM ‘Most’ List: Our Most-Read, Most-Watched and Most Influential Work of 2024
The past year brought innovations, challenges, and big steps toward our common goal of advancing trusted research. This year, we honed our focus on four strategic areas of activity — Research Integrity, Open Research, Social Responsibility, and Technology Innovation. We produced reports and resources, held events and engagements, kept members up to date on the latest in policy, copyright, and more.
What rose to the top? Let’s have a look.
Our most-read reports
- Scholarly infrastructure report. STM Solutions and six of our members funded this independent report from Ithaka S+R, which takes a strategic look at the scholarly infrastructure we share. With the scholarly publishing industry in the middle of its second digital transformation, the report explores collective ways to close gaps and invest in the future while maintaining a commitment to research integrity.
- A look into the future. Every year, our members gather to imagine the next five years in scholarly communication. Our annual STM Trends meeting resulted in a compelling, predictive image of 2028 and the networked machine era, exploring tough questions about trust, cohesion and generative AI.
- Solutions for detecting falsified images. As research integrity becomes increasingly complicated in the age of AI, this report — funded by STM and developed by MoreBrains Cooperative — evaluates existing solutions for identifying falsified images in research. This deep dive into technological efficacy is a powerful source of proposed solutions throughout the research ecosystem.
- Navigating GenAI in scholarly communications. Using AI in scholarly publishing raises a minefield of ethical, practical and legal topics for stakeholders to navigate. Our white paper demystifies these topics for authors, editorial teams, reviewers and vendors to inform a responsible approach to utilising GenAI technologies.
- Digital identity and research integrity. STM Solutions assembled a group of experts to publish this investigation into identity manipulation and explore potential solutions for ensuring integrity. Our report covers the methods bad actors use to subvert identity systems and ways researchers and publishers can establish trustworthiness.
Our most-viewed video resources
- Digital preservation. Our webinar examines the critical work of preserving scholarly publications, featuring expert publishers and librarians who identify solid preservation solutions in a field with many opportunities for improvement. We highlight processes that are crucial to the longevity of the scholarly record, yet often unseen by the research community.
- Boosting early career publishers. We gathered five senior editors and publishing experts to share their career trajectories and offer advice on next steps in various career paths. The diverse panellists included professionals with extensive experience as hiring managers, project managers and board members, for a webinar packed with insights for publishers at any stage in their career.
- Image integrity video tutorials. As altered images become more common and more sophisticated, we developed a series of video modules illustrating best practices for the most commonly found image aberrations in scientific publications. The tutorials feature blot images and microscopy images and serve as educational resources to help academic journal editors stay ahead in the arms race of image manipulation.
Our most-accessed web resources
- Safeguarding the integrity of science. Arming publishers with simple, powerful tools designed to detect potential breaches of research integrity, the STM Integrity Hub empowers publishers to protect the scholarly record. The Hub is a cloud-based environment with a flexible, growing collection of tools to help publishers of any kind save time and resources and prevent fraudulent research from entering the system.
- Open Access dashboard. The STM OA Dashboard illuminates key statistics on the progress of Open Access, informing stakeholders on the current landscape as the publishing industry moves towards full OA. The latest insights from the Dashboard examine ~33 million journal articles, reviews and conference papers.
- Best practices for research data sharing. With the help of DataCite and Crossref, we announced an updated joint statement on research data. Our shared mission to amplify the focus on data citation led to 12 best practices and recommendations for researchers, data repositories, publishers, funders, research organisations and policymaking institutions.
- Action plan for achieving the SDGs. Our SDG Sustainability Roadmap provides concrete, actionable steps towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Roadmap features a level-based approach so that all publishers — big, small, new to the SDGs or looking to build on previous accomplishments — can take action today to contribute to a more sustainable, equitable world.
- Get to know us! The launch of our redesigned website prompted a surge in traffic to our Who We Are page. If you haven’t checked out the new site, it’s a perfect time to take a look, catch up on everything we’re doing and get involved.
Browse our full resource center for more STM resources.
