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Peer-reviewed, scholarly journals play a critical role in disseminating biomedical research. Scientific publications must be reported and disseminated according to particular best practice standards in order to be of use to clinicians, other researchers, and patients. For example, published research should be properly indexed and archived so that it can be found and preserved over time. Several calls have been made for academic journals to become more transparent, including opening up the peer-review process and making study data publicly available. To address this call for increased transparency, we want to develop a publicly available digital journal transparency tool that can assist different stakeholders including the public, researchers, and publishers to ascertain information about how a journal operates and which best practices it meets. The aim of this particular research study is to determine the needs and preferences for a digital transparency tool from the publishing community.

An STM Working Group on Image Alteration and Duplication Detection has been working on best-practice recommendations that outline a structured approach to support editors and others applying image integrity screening as part of pre-publication quality control checks or post-publication investigation of image and data integrity issues at scholarly journals, books, preprint servers, or data repositories. It provides principles and a three-tier classification for different types of image and data aberrations commonly detected in image integrity screens of figures in research papers and for a consideration of impact on the scholarly study; it also recommends actions journal editors may take to protect the scholarly record. With these recommendations, the STM Working Group aims to contribute a consistent, structured and efficient framework for handling image integrity issues both within and between journals and publishers. The framework should support editors in safeguarding research integrity and fortifying the scientific process for the benefit of the scientific community. The recommendations are open for comments until October 31st. The final recommendations, in which we will attempt to process all suggestions and recommendation, will be presented at the STM Innovations Seminar on December 7th. To comment on the document, please register and use the 'comment' icon on the top right of your screen, or send your comments to rossum@stm-assoc.org.