September 19-23 marks Peer Review Week 2022!
During Peer Review Week, the scholarly communications community comes together to reflect on and celebrate the pivotal role peer review plays in research dissemination. This year’s theme, “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research,” poses the following question: How can the scholarly community demonstrate research integrity, enhance understanding of peer review, and promote trust in review processes? Going into this week, we asked ourselves:
What is AIP Publishing doing to help address research integrity?
Of the key issues raised in our discussions, research integrity and reproducibility were most often cited. Being able to replicate the same result as previously published research is a crucial component of the research ecosystem. AIP Publishing believes all datasets underlying the conclusions of a paper should be available to readers, and we’ve built our submission process to require authors to provide a data availability statement so readers can readily learn where the data can be found — increasing reproducibility.
To increase transparency — and therefore the integrity of the research — we’ve implemented the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system. CRediT is a high-level industry standard allowing a paper’s author or authors to clearly represent the specific role of every contributor. It highlights the roles each team member played in the work and ensures ethical requirements for an authorship credit are met.
Trust in research is created by not only by having the right policies and infrastructure in place — but also the right people. In addition to our evolving editorial policies, AIP Publishing enlists expert Editors working in the field to lead our journals. They ensure the research submitted is vetted by knowledgeable reviewers and that each submission has been reviewed fairly and objectively prior to publication. Further, our Journals and Editors are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which provides support and guidance on all aspects of publication ethics. By submitting a manuscript to AIP Publishing journals, each author explicitly confirms that the manuscript meets these criteria for authors and coauthors.
AIP Publishing will continually look for ways to foster research integrity. We look forward seeing all the initiatives taking place across the industry during Peer Review Week!