Celebrating Peer Review Week at BMC: How Peer Review can help uphold research integrity

Maintaining research integrity requires a whole community: from the beginning of the scientific process to the publication of the results, multiple actors – funders, researchers, institutions, publishers – are involved. In reality, no single group is solely responsible for upholding research to high standards and a variety of stakeholders need to remain vigilant. However, it is the last stage of the scientific process, the communication of scientific research, where robust peer review acts as one of the last gatekeepers for research integrity. Here we discuss how as open access BMC journals (part of Springer Nature), we support rigorous peer review to ensure research is reproducible, robust and trusted.  Strong foundations Ensuring research integrity begins at submission and from our inception over 20 years ago, BMC has adopted strong editorial policies that ensure that we will only consider research that is conducted to high and recognized international standards. From ensuring all work involving human participants adheres to the Declaration of Helsinki to ensuring the appropriate use of anesthetics in animal research, each submission is checked for adherence to our policies.  A key aspect of some of the high profile COVID-19 retractions has been concerns with the underlying data. The importance of data availability for experts to evaluate before publication is clear and at BMC we strongly encourage that all data underlying the conclusions of a study are made a...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Biology Health Medical Evidence Medicine Open Access Publishing innovation open peer review peer review week publication misconduct Registered Reports results-free peer review Transparent peer review Source Type: blogs