To begin, we'll hear from two experts in this arena on the ethics and diversity in scientific publications, trends from ASGE's gastrointestinal endoscopy. This is being presented by Deborah Bowman, who is the senior managing editor of clinical publications for the ASGE, working on both GIE and video GIE. She has a BA in English education from Purdue University, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, and is certified as an editor in the Life Sciences. She's been with the ASGE for nearly 15 years after prior work at Elsevier, formerly Mosby Publishing in St. Louis. She will be joined by Stephanie Kidden, the managing editor of clinical publications for ASGE. She received her master's degree from the University of Chicago, where her studies focused on publication ethics, which we'll be certain to hear about this afternoon. She is a council member for the Committee on Publication Ethics and previously served on the board of directors of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors. Welcome, Ms. Bowman and Kidden. We look forward to your discussion. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm going to focus my presentation on ethics and scientific publications. As was mentioned, I'm the managing editor of clinical publications for the ASGE, and I wanted to start off by talking to you a little bit about why publication ethics matter. Clinical publishing creates the basis for most of our scientific and technological advancements, and in order to have progress in these fields, we really need to make sure that we're basing this on rigorous and sound research. Ethical standards also ensure the safety and efficacy of medical advancements, and the publishing influences academic careers and fundings and really determines where the fields of academia go in the future. We do know that ethical practices are often passed down from mentors to mentees, creating a cycle of bad behavior, and this disregard for ethical practices threatens the overall integrity of the scholarly publishing community. Right now, there's just a current lack of education and standardization in the field. In recent years, we've seen a lot of evolving trends involving things like open access publishing and preprint servers. There have been developments in new technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media, and we really need to adapt our ethical standards for these changes in the field. There are often inconsistencies that we can see from country to country, field to field, and journal to journal, and there's just a widespread ignorance of ethical best practices throughout the scholarly publishing community. As an author, it's your responsibility to educate yourself on the best practices, to know your field and what ethical expectations there are in your area of expertise. Follow new trends and developments, and make sure you're taking responsibility for all your work. The ethical standards of your work are up to you to learn about and to make sure you're following. Use resources like the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the Committee on Publication Ethics. Both of these bodies offer great resources about current practices, especially in the medical publishing expectations that you need to follow. So make sure you're keeping up to date with those types of resources. Publishing an article from the original study design through to the final publication can take years of work, and there are lots of steps and there are different ethical considerations during each of those stages. And I want to make sure that you have a good basis for what is expected of you in each of those stages, so I'd like to take a look at those areas a little bit deeper today. So starting off first with research integrity. You need to be aware about data manipulation and bias in your own work. All of your research methods must be rigorous, reproducible, and follow ethical protocols. Be careful you're not fabricating or falsifying any data to achieve your desired study results. Make sure the conclusions you draw are unbiased. It's easy for us to get really attached to our work, and especially if our results didn't turn out exactly as planned, it's tempting to paint those things in a more positive light. But you can inflate your results. You need to avoid any kind of embellishment, selective reporting, or omitting results that don't align with your message you're trying to put out in your article. So really just be careful that all of your data interpretations are accurate, complete, and unbiased. If you are including images in an article, you cannot manipulate those images. It can't be altered to better support your research or in any way that may interfere with the interpretation of the data. There are two main types of image manipulation, neither of which are ethical. The first of which is clarification. This is when you clean up a figure to make it clearer, maybe enhance the contrast or remove distracting background images, just so it looks a little more appealing or you can better get your message across. You cannot do that. It has to be, you have to use the original image as is. Another type of image manipulation is deception. This is much more blatant. This is when you do some major editing to add or remove something that is not in line with the desired results. Now you can enhance your figure in a couple of ways. You can add things like arrows, circles, or highlights to draw the reader's eye to a specific part of the image that you need them to see. You can also magnify an image, but if you're going to do that, you must state the level of magnification in the image caption. Many journals will use software to analyze images for manipulation. So it's getting more and more difficult to get away with manipulating an image. Just like you can use Photoshop to edit an image, a journal can use Photoshop to detect that manipulation. One thing that you are encouraged to change in your photos, though, or your images, is any patient-identifying information. You can remove, blur, or black out things like their name, their identifying number, or their face, and try to get patient consents to use those images whenever possible. The next topic I wanted to turn to is research and publishing protocols. It's very important that you understand what is expected of you in your field. There may be things like institutional review board approval, clinical trial registration, or patient consent that you need, and this could be needed even before you begin designing your study. If it is required and you fail to get the appropriate documentation, that can result in immediate rejection of an article. Also be aware of the type of article you're writing and if there are any guidelines for that specific type of study. For example, if you're writing a systematic review, we encourage you to use PRISMA guidelines. Plagiarism, duplicate text, and duplicate publication. Plagiarism and duplicate text are often used interchangeably in this field. We all know plagiarism is wrong. You should not do it. All of the content that you take from another source must be cited and placed in the reference list. If you're going to reuse any figures from another source, you need that source to be noted and you need permission to use those figures. If you're going to use a direct quote, attribute that and put it in quotation marks. If you're going to take results or a large chunk of text from another study, you can't just copy and paste that in. It needs to be rewarded and cited so that there is not direct overlap. It's getting very difficult for authors to get away with plagiarism. Very easy for us to detect it. Every journal uses some kind of plagiarism checking software such as authenticate similarity check. Each submission is run through this system and it shows us if there's any overlap with published work. If you plagiarize, you will get caught and there's pretty intense consequences for plagiarism. Of course, your article will be immediately rejected, but we also at GIE will reach out to the fellow authors and let them know of the incident and often even the author's institution, which could result in some harm to the author's career, needless to say. One area that's often overlooked in plagiarism is self-plagiarism. It's important that you understand the copyright agreement for your published article. Once an article is published, most journals assume that copyright and the copyright no longer belongs to the author. When that happens, moving forward, all citation and attribution rules now apply to your previously published work, meaning that you need to properly cite that, reference it, get permissions to use the figures, even though it was an article you wrote. To avoid self-plagiarism, you need to reword the text that you wrote if you are going to use sections of that just like you would in somebody else's article. Be aware of duplicate publication. I shouldn't have to say this, but I will. Do not publish the same article in more than one journal. That should be a given in this field. But you also need to know that you cannot publish the same data sets with minor alterations. Each article needs to have new data and a new hypothesis. If you're using the same group of patients in more than one article, make that very clear in your article. Using the same patient set multiple times can really skew the literature. For example, if you're writing an article about a rare disease in a set of patients and then use that same set to write another article, someone coming along writing a systematic review and meta-analysis may see those two articles and think that they're separate patient sets, which makes it look like the disease is more prevalent than it actually is. So you have to be really transparent with that. Also avoid salami slicing. This is a fun term that we use for the unethical practice of taking data and cutting it up into multiple parts to get more publications out of it. I know that's tempting to do because everybody wants to get more published articles, but each article needs to have complete, transparent research in it. Don't divide it up into multiple pieces. Only submit to one journal at a time. You can't try to get published faster by submitting to a bunch of journals at once. That's unethical, and it's really disrespectful to the peer reviewers and the editors. And in the long term, it may affect your ability to get published. Remember, this is a small community. It's not unusual for editors and peer reviewers to talk to one another. So if they find out that you're doing this and you're submitting to multiple journals at once, that's likely going to result in rejection from all of the journals. If you do receive a rejection, remember to consider the peer review commentary. Those comments can be really helpful to help you revise and better your chances of getting some accepted at the next journal. So take that as a learning experience. Accept the rejection, revise, then resubmit. GIE tries to make the process of submission really simple by using your paper your way. This basically means that you don't have to jump through a lot of formatting hoops when you want to submit to us. You can just throw all your content into one document, you know, the text, the figures, the tables, and submit fairly quickly. Fairly quickly. And hopefully that makes the process a little easier on you when you are submitting to one journal after another if your article is rejected. The next subject area I wanted to talk about was authorship. Authorship has very strict guidelines and criteria that you need to meet. We use the ICMJE guidelines for authorship. An author must make a substantial contribution to the conception, design, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data. They must have a role in drafting the work or revising it critically. They must give final approval of the version to be published, and they must be accountable for all aspects of work. If you do not meet all of these standards, then you cannot be listed as an author. Many journals are even starting to limit the number of authors listed on an article to avoid hyperauthorship. Hyperauthorship is a practice in which many authors, anybody basically who had any hand in it or touched the article in any way gets listed. And sometimes it gets out of control. There have been articles where hundreds or even thousands of authors have been listed on the author list. We know that there's no way that they all contributed appropriately to that study. We limit the authors to 15 for original articles. Exceptions can be made if there really are truly authors who met that criteria and that exceeds that limit of 15. If you do have additional contributors who don't qualify as authors, you can recognize them in an acknowledgement statement. Looking at the author list specifically, there are various roles that you need to think about when you're putting the order together. So the first author is obviously the greatest contributor to the work, and then the following authors should be listed in order of their contribution. The mentor or senior author on the project is often listed as the last author, but that's not set in stone. It's really up to the co-authors to decide where that mentor should appear on the author list. The corresponding author is one of the most important roles, but it can take place on any place in the author list. They're in charge of basically the overall publication process. So they need to gather the COIs, the conflicts of interest. They need to verify the accuracy of the author list. They submit the article. They communicate with the journal office and the publisher. They oversee the revision process, review article proofs, and are responsible for the accuracy of the content. So it's a very important role, often thankless though, because there really isn't any official credit associated with being a corresponding author. You must determine the author order early on in the study design process, preferably before you even get started with anything, because if you wait till, you know, the article is written, that opens it up to conflict, you know, when people are trying to grow higher on the author list. Journals will not mediate any kind of dispute you have in authorship. GIE and Video GIE actually require that all authors sign off on any changes they want to make to an article once it has been accepted for publication. So ideally, the author list is set long before the article even gets to us. There are two types of guest and ghost, or two types of authorship, guest and ghost authorship, that are on the rise recently, and they're both very unethical. Guest authorship is when a person who doesn't qualify for authorship is included on an author list. Now, this most often occurs when a young professional, an early career researcher, feels obligated to include a mentor or senior member of an institution, maybe because they feel pressure, or it could happen if, you know, an author thinks that they might gain favor from that senior member of the staff by including them in the author list. Ghost authorship, on the other hand, is when a person who deserves to be on the author list is omitted. And this occurs most often when someone is hired to write an article, but it could also happen when an author doesn't want their name associated with an article. For example, they might have a major conflict of interest that they don't want known, so they remove their name from that list. So both of these are very unethical practices. Author lists must be complete and transparent. All of the authors must meet those requirements. I put them in the chat, and I'm going to go ahead and share them. Authors cannot be omitted due to any kind of authorship dispute or because they don't want to be associated anymore with that article. Conflicts of interest are something we've been taking very serious in recent years. There are three main types of conflicts of interest, financial, loyalty, and bias. Financial is related to things like research, funding, employment, ownership, and stocks, any type of conflict that involves money generally. Loyalty is there are things like professional relationships, maybe volunteering advisory roles. Bias includes things like favoritism, opinions, prejudices, and occasionally personal relationships. So it's important to recognize that not all conflicts are financially related. But if you are looking at financial conflicts, there's no minimum threshold for that. So if someone buys you a $3 cup of coffee, that could still be considered a financial conflict. It's best practice to disclose conflicts existing within the last three years. That does sometimes vary journal to journal. Occasionally, a journal will say every two years or every five years. But a good rule of thumb is three years, and that's what we use. It's important to be aware of perceived bias. Just because you don't see something as a conflict doesn't mean others won't. So take a good, hard look at yourself and think, okay, what do I have going on that someone else might see as a potential conflict? And then when in doubt, just disclose it. You cannot over-disclose. So if you are worried that something may or may not be a conflict, just add it in. It's better to disclose it, even if it's not relevant, than to omit something that might cause you problems down the line. GIE and Video GIE collect conflicts of interest from all of our authors, reviewers, and editors. And we have processes in place in case those conflicts arise to recuse an editor if they don't think that they can give an unbiased opinion on an article. We include disclosure statements on every article published that lists the COIs for every author. And the editor-in-chief, Mike Wallace, even verifies a lot of those disclosure statements on open payments. If you're not familiar with this website, it lists the conflicts of interest for people in the medical field. So you can actually go to that website yourself and you can look your name up and see if there's anything that you might be overlooking. So it's really important that you're very transparent about your conflicts, because much like plagiarism, if you omit a conflict, that can really harm your reputation or your career. Not only will it result in immediate rejection if you are deliberately omitting conflicts, but it can also result in a retraction later on if a conflict is discovered that you didn't disclose. That can harm your reputation in your career. This year, GIE and Video GIE will start using Convey, which is a COI database that we hope will make it easier for authors to collect and submit their conflicts of interest. So look out for that in the coming months. So what do we do if something does go wrong? Well, that's when retractions and errata come into play. We do give authors proofs of their articles before publication. It's the author's responsibility to ensure that everything is 100% accurate, absolutely correct and perfect. You need to check data, references, quotes, the author list. You need to check to make sure that no small error was accidentally inserted somehow between the exception of the article and during the formatting and layout process. Just make sure you're thoroughly checking everything and it's perfect so that you don't have a problem later on. But if an error is discovered, you need to immediately inform the journal or the publisher and then they will determine what course of action is needed. It could just be an errata, which is a correction to a small isolated portion of an otherwise reliable article or a retraction may be needed if the article is found to be unreliable because of major miscalculations or experimental errors, falsified or fabricated data, plagiarized or duplicated content, unauthorized material, legal issues such as copyright infringement, unethical research, a compromised peer review process or lack of conflicts of interest transparency. So there are a lot of things that can lead to a retraction and you just need to make sure that you are aware that of these standards, these ethical standards, and that your article is perfect before it is published. Finally, I wanted to delve into the area of predatory publishing. This is a very unethical and scary thing that is arising in the scholarly publishing community in recent years. Predatory publishing is when illegitimate journals profit off of eager to publish authors. They promise quick turnaround times and guaranteed acceptance. It's important to understand the atmosphere that created this rise in predatory publishing. So there are two big types of publishing models. There's the subscription journal, which is what GIE is, and this is when authors, or excuse me, when readers pay to subscribe to a journal. Then there's an open access model, which is becoming much more popular in recent years. That's the model that VideoGIE is. The open access model allows articles to be freely available to any audience member, but the authors pay a small article processing charge to publish in that journal. So predatory publishers are taking advantage of this by masquerading as open access journals. They often then have hidden or unspecified article fees that they use to extort money from unsuspecting authors. And once you publish in a predatory journal, you can't get that content back. You can't republish that in a legitimate journal. It's just gone. So you have to protect yourself and protect your content. Predatory journals will go so far as to misappropriate well-known names in your field, listing them as editorial board members to try to trick authors into thinking they're a legitimate journal. Now, of course, you want to protect yourself from this. You're asking yourself, how do I know if a journal is predatory? Well, there are some warning signs you can look out for, first of which is spelling and grammar errors on the website or emails. They are getting a little bit better about this, but in general, they're just not taking the time or putting in the effort to make sure that those emails and websites are spelling and grammar error free. You might get an unprompted email solicitation. Now, sometimes legitimate journals do put out calls for papers through email, but if you get a strange solicitation email from a journal you've never heard of or had anything to do with, that might be a warning sign. Predatory journals also have too wide of a scope because they're trying to get as many papers as possible. Notice that GIE and video GIE have very specific scopes. So if the scope, if they're just asking for any kind of medical article instead of an endoscopy article, that might be a red flag. There's also a lack of transparency usually regarding any kind of article processing or peer review processes. Every legitimate journal will lay that out clearly for you on their websites or their instructions for authors. They usually have some kind of suspicious fees. Open access publishing is very clear about the way they do things in their fee structures. So if there's suspicious or hidden fees, that's a warning sign. They will promise unrealistic turnaround times. Unfortunately, the peer review process just takes a long time. It can take weeks or even months to get an article accepted for publication. So if an email is offering you a turnaround time of a week or two, that's a warning sign as well. They often use non-institutional email addresses like Yahoo or Gmail. So look out for that. In recent years, they've been getting tricky by using journal names or mimicking journal names that are popular in the field. But something might be slightly off about it. For example, instead of gastrointestinal endoscopy, it might say gastroendoscopy. And then you ask yourself, well, wait, is that the correct name? And then make sure you research that and look it up. And that's really the final suggestion is to just do your research. Ask your colleagues, have they heard of this journal? Have they published in it? Do they know the reputation of this journal? Check the directory of open access journals. This is a great database because they're doing a lot to catalog all the legitimate open access journals out there, but it's not foolproof. Things slip through the cracks. So don't rely completely on that. And also just review the published content and the websites of that journal. Does it look like they're publishing high quality science? Do you recognize the name of the other authors that are publishing there? Make sure it looks legitimate. So really just trust your instincts with that, too, after you do all your research. Make sure you feel comfortable submitting there. So I've thrown a lot of information at you during the course of this presentation, so I just wanted to leave you with some take home points, some do's and don'ts. So do cite your author list in order before beginning research and make sure all authors qualify. Do collect a complete list of conflicts of interest for each author. Don't plagiarize. Cite all your research properly. Don't fabricate data, skew results, or manipulate your images. Don't salami slice your data. Don't introduce bias into your writing. Do follow all regulations and protocols for your field of study. Do research the reputation of a journal before submitting your article so you don't get taken in by a predatory publisher. Do thoroughly review all author instructions and be willing to adapt your materials as needed. And do thoroughly check your work before publication to avoid potential for errata or retractions later on. So I'd like to thank you for taking the time to listen to me speak about publication ethics. I've included my email address as well as the email address for GIE and VideoGIE, so please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want more information. With that, I will turn it over to Debra Bowman, who's going to speak about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

ethics

scientific publications

research integrity

data manipulation

authorship guidelines

predatory publishing

transparency