This week is Publishing Integrity Week 2025, organised annually by the Committee of Publications Ethics (COPE). This event explores various themes linked to research integrity and ethics in scholarly publishing. To celebrate the week, we’re taking a closer look at each of the themes and discuss how the BSI journals portfolio are addressing these key challenges facing the industry, exploring current approaches and best practice, and highlighting our thoughts for the future.
The evolving landscape of publication ethics
Across the publishing industry, we are seeing a significant rise in research integrity and ethical issues that threaten to infiltrate the scholarly record with fabricated research and data. At the BSI, we’re committed to ensure that our journals, Clinical & Experimental Immunology, Immunotherapy Advances and Discovery Immunology, remain a trusted source of information.
A major threat to sound science is the rise of papermills. These are defined by COPE as ‘the process by which manufactured manuscripts are submitted to a journal for a fee on behalf of researchers with the purpose of providing an easy publication for them, or to offer authorship for sale'. Our Editors-in-Chief and editorial teams are vigilant in looking for these papers during the submission process. However, with the rise in generative AI models, papermills have the resources to create more, and more convincing, fake papers that they then send to multiple journals in the hope of bypassing editorial filters.
While the threat of individuals using AI for these negative endeavours is a concern, we also recognise that AI also brings it opportunity to aid researchers when conducting their research and writing their papers. Our current AI policy, found in our journal’s Author Guidelines, is that the ‘use of AI (for example, to help generate content or images, write code, process data, or for translation) should be disclosed both in cover letters to editors and in the Methods or Acknowledgements section of manuscripts.’ This allows our authors to use AI to improve the quality of their work and make data analysis more efficient. By asking authors to disclose their use of AI, we hope that we can encourage transparency surrounding AI usage, so that AI innovation can be embraced in an ethical way.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Accessibility in practice
At the BSI, improving Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity and Accessibility is one of the cornerstones of our current strategy. Our aim is to foster a culture within immunology that ensures fair treatment and opportunity for all. This extends to all three of our journals.. Part of this includes ensuring that our Editorial teams are as diverse as possible to fully represent the immunology community. Across our three journals, we have Editorial Board members from 26 different countries, and we endeavour to increase our representation.
DEI is one area we predict that AI will make a positive impact. By using these tools in proof-reading articles and supporting non-native English speakers in preparing their manuscripts, quality research can be shared more widely.
Our publishing partner, Oxford University Press, is working to make journals content more accessible including for those with visual, hearing, cognitive, or motor impairment. The OUP website lists all they are doing to meet these goals including recently introduced alternative text (available via the ereader) which provides concise and informative descriptions of figures to support people using screen readers in comprehending figures within our articles more easily.
Collaboration and community building
Strengthening the immunology community is a key objective of the BSI, and our journals are an important facilitator of helping immunologists grow their networks and enhance collaboration.
We also have bult close community across our Editorial teams for each journal, who work together to maintain high integrity standards across our journals. This means keeping aware and adapting to changes across publishing. Of course, collaboration with our Publisher helps us keep our finger on the pulse as things change across industry, which allows us to keep our policies and best practices robust.
Additionally, a key area where we embrace collaboration , is through peer review, where we rely on our excellent reviewers in assessing our submitted papers, ensuring the science is sound and alerting us to any possible ethical concerns. As well as helping us to ensure the scholarly record within the immunology community is a trusted resource, reviewing for our journals also helps researchers develop professionally. We sincerely thank all our reviewers for their time and dedication to our journals as they are vital to our success.
Upholding publication integrity - the role of universities and research institutes
The fourth day of ‘Publishing Integrity week’ looks at the role of universities and institutes and how they can help when it comes to maintaining integrity. An area of growing importance is on educating researchers on ethical best practice when submitting papers to journals. The BSI and OUP have many resources for this and are always working on how we can support researchers. We’re looking forward to running a special session at BSI Congress 2025, titled ‘AI in Publishing.’ Here, Rachel Moriarty will discuss all things AI to inform researchers how to use AI to support their research and what to avoid.
Innovations, solutions, and the road ahead
What lies ahead in terms of tackling publishing integrity is vast and complex. A key area of this will be what tools will emerge to help better support publishers in recognising integrity and ethical issues in submitted papers. These new tools will also need to adapt to changing tactics within papermill organisations as they also develop their approaches with new technologies.
Only time will tell what the future will bring but one thing we can be sure of is that the BSI will remain dedicated to working with our community in ensuring published work has been robustly assessed. We are committed to staying informed and adapting when needed, including keeping our AI policies and best practises to industry standards as part of our mission to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record for our immunology community.