User:Valmataro/Publication ethics

(first rough draft)

The process of scientific communication, through the publication of research articles, depends greatly on the honesty and responsibility of all persons involved&mdash;researcher-authors, reviewers, editors and readers&mdash;and on their reciprocal trust. Good publication practice is guided by universal concepts, deontology, and a series of reporting guidelines prepared by various international associations.

Over the past decade or two, there has been a rapid evolution in the concepts of research ethics and the related publishing ethics. Researcher-authors must adhere to increasingly rigorous standards of ethical behavior, for example regarding how clinicians obtain informed consent, and they must document this behavior with increasing detail in their published reports. These changes reflect the international scientific community's response to the increase in ethical breaches, lack of transparency, and incompleteness of the reported findings. Such problems have become more evident due to the availability of online journals and to software and online tools that facilitate digital text analysis. The digitalization of the scientific literature may have also made these problems more frequent. Because online publishing has led to a notable growth in the number of published articles and has "globalized" both research and academic publishing, fraud is easier and self-regulation within the scientific community is more difficult.

Sources of guidance in publishing ethics
The main source of publishing ethics guidance for all scholarly fields is the Committee on Publication Ethics.