JOINTrusted Identity in Academic Publishing
The central role of digital identity in research integrity.
For centuries, academic publishing has operated on a basis of trust, with an implicit assumption that individuals interacting with an academic journal do so in good faith and within established norms and practices. This high degree of trust means that researchers typically are not required to prove their identity or good intentions when they submit a paper for publication, act as peer-reviewer, or join an editorial board. In fact, most publishers require little more than a working email address to let users take part in the submissions and peer-review process.
Recent cases of mass retractions attributed to fraudulence, and a growing number of research integrity issues in academic publishing more generally, illustrate that this trust is increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. Paper mills and dishonest individuals have been able to subvert these processes for financial or reputational gain, risking pollution of the scholarly record and leading to a steep increase in retractions. As a consequence, there is now a gap between the level of trust that editorial systems need and the level that researchers can easily provide.
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