SAGE’s Research Integrity Group

By Louise Skelding Tattle, Associate Director, Research Integrity

As the theme of this year’s Peer Review Week is Research Integrity, I’d like to highlight the Research Integrity Group (RIG) at SAGE and say a few things about how the RIG works to improve and protect our publishing processes. It would be remiss of me not to disclose a conflict of interest as Chair of the RIG. I am openly and happily biased about how important the RIG is and the work the group does in tackling the challenges and obstacles that threaten to come in between research integrity and the erosion of public trust in science.

What is the RIG?

We’re a global cross-departmental group responsible for monitoring research integrity trends and developing SAGE’s publication ethics and inclusivity policies, workflows, and guidelines for both SAGE staff and our journal editors. Colleagues from Editorial, Peer Review, Legal and Production work together with our Research Integrity team to understand where improvements are needed and where there might be gaps in our existing practices. We also continually review our policies to ensure they are compliant with COPE and other industry standards.

Collaboration is key

As publishers we have a fundamental role to play in maintaining the integrity of the academic record, which means ensuring the whole process from submission to publication is fair, transparent and free from bias, and that research published has been conducted in accordance with appropriate standards. Collaboration with our journal editors, publishing partners and others in the research and publishing communities is vital as we all share responsibility for upholding research integrity.

When the process is compromised we can come up against problems that might be difficult to unravel and involve many parts of the publishing process. This is why strong relationships between publishing departments are so important. Being a cross-departmental group enables us to build and develop those relationships so that we can work together effectively to tackle ethics issues and put in place preventive measures.

How we work

We like lively debate and challenging each other to make sure we’re looking at something from every possible angle! It can be tough to find the right balance with some policy or process proposals that are brought to the group. For example, we want to do everything we can to pull up the drawbridge against paper mills, but we don’t want to make submitting to a SAGE journal impossible for genuine authors.

Future focus

SAGE has been developing tools to support research integrity work, as have many of our fellow publishers. As we continue to invest in this area, the RIG will have an increasingly important advisory role to play here and will be working ever more closely with our Technology colleagues. We are excited to harness new tools and technologies that will help advance our aim to publish quality and impactful content.

Why I love the RIG

It is challenging work but central to what we do as publishers in helping to preserve trust in scientific research. I am proud to be part of the RIG and fortunate to be able to work with so many amazing and passionate colleagues.

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About the Author