(8 Dec 2021) STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM (The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) today announced that it has started the development of a powerful new platform to detect integrity issues in manuscripts submitted for publication to scholarly journals.
“This collaboration hub will provide a cloud-based environment for publishers to check submitted articles for research integrity issues. In this environment publishers can collaborate with other parties to develop and operate screening tools for the benefit of the entire scholarly ecosystem”, explained Joris van Rossum, the newly appointed Product Director for this initiative.
The platform will significantly improve publishers’ capabilities to detect and remedy research integrity issues before publication, empowering the STM publishing industry to advance highquality, trusted research.
Recent years have seen a significant increase in research integrity issues. A striking example are so-called ‘paper mills’, fraudulent organizations that produce counterfeit manuscripts submitted to academic journals. Increasingly advanced technologies are used in the process to fabricate, plagiarize, and manipulate text, images, and research data. This is placing a large burden on publishers, editors, and reviewers, who call for reliable, state-of-the-art technology solutions to detect misconduct like this and support the editorial decision-making process.
The collaboration platform will be built on an architecture that ensures that publishers maintain full control over the content, safeguarding privacy and confidentiality. Critically, by working with content from multiple publishers, the system will be able to detect issues that transcend single submissions, journals, or publishers.
The press release in full is here.
