Computer science society creates new research integrity role to address case backlog 

Over the last five years, the Association for Computing Machinery has been dealing with a rapid rise in allegations of research misconduct that have created a backlog of cases to investigate.

The publisher has a committee to analyze claims, but with only a small group of volunteers, cases can take a year or more to resolve, said Scott Delman, ACM’s director of publications. To address allegations faster and with a sharper focus, the association is hiring a director of research integrity, a new role for the publisher. 

“Certainly, we’ve been investing more financial resources in research integrity over the last five years, but we need an expert,” Delman told us. “We’re long past due in having a dedicated director of research integrity who will be the central resource for ACM on all things relating to integrity.” 

The new role comes after several large-scale retractions by ACM due to misconduct claims, including the removal of an entire conference proceeding that included at least 26 papers, and another conference proceeding with more than 300 articles. The publisher has come under fire by sleuths in the past for taking years to investigate problematic conference proceedings and for allegedly underreporting retractions.

One long-time critic of ACM said he was not impressed by the new role. Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, Switzerland, has raised past concerns about ACM articles and was sued for defamation by one of the implicated authors.

“ACM has made it clear they are not interested in upholding the industry standard COPE guidelines for research integrity, Pirelli, whose defamation conviction was overturned on appeal, told us. “Low-level hiring decisions are unlikely to change this.”

A recent study in arXiv found no retractions for ACM before 2020, and that common retraction reasons, such as misconduct, plagiarism, and data concerns, were “entirely absent” from ACM’s record. Of 354 retractions by ACM in the dataset, all but two were retracted as a result of compromised peer review in two sets of conference proceedings. 

In addition to 70-plus journals, Delman said ACM publishes the proceedings for more than 500 conferences a year.

“Each of those conferences have their own volunteer leadership,” he said. “Each of those conferences are identifying potential misconduct with submissions, and they all come to ACM at headquarters for advice. ‘How do we handle this? What are the policies? How do we implement those policies?’” 

The new director of research integrity will oversee policies, systems and procedures for detecting, investigating and preventing research misconduct and ethical breaches across ACM’s journals, conference proceedings, magazines and Digital Library, Delman said. The director will also serve as primary liaison for editors, reviewers, authors, partner organizations and the ACM Ethics & Plagiarism Committee on matters of publication ethics, AI transparency and emerging research integrity challenges, he said.  

ACM is also in the process of an extensive request for proposals for software tools to identify integrity issues, he told us. 

“There are always going to be bad actors who are trying to get away with something. The goal is that ACM is more effective at identifying it,” Delman told us. “At the end of the day, it’s about trust and making sure there’s a higher level of confidence in the published literature.”

Over the last decade, more journals and publishers have added research integrity specialists to their teams to spot and root out misconduct.

BMJ Group is currently recruiting a research integrity editor, a new position for the publisher, according to a spokesperson. 

Delman also pointed to the newly developed CLEAR Task Force (Community-Led Ethics for Accountability in Research), an initiative coordinated by ACM that’s tasked with examining unethical behavior in scientific research and publication practices in computing and identifying how to eliminate the behavior. The taskforce is in its initial stages, but will include representatives from the Computing Research Association and others from the computing community, according to its website. 

The group aims to create a set of standardized policies, share information and develop penalties for bad actors, Delman told us. 

“Being able to work with a consortium of interested organizations and being able to set standards for acceptable behavior is really important for our community,” he said. 

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