On November 19, 2024, I joined a panel at the Council of Science Editors’ (CSE) 2024 Fall Virtual Symposium to discuss ‘Are Ethics Geographically Equitable? Maintaining the Sanctity of the Published Scholarly Record’. While preparing for the session, I started thinking about a few issues around ethics, which are captured in this article.

We often identify ethics in scholarly publishing as an issue of capacity: not knowing how to separate ethical practices from unethical ones. That’s why we see conversations on ethics focus on checklists and guidelines of do’s and don’t’s, and training on these for individual roles, such as researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, administrators of institutions, and funders. But there are other dimensions to it — beyond responsible actions by individuals — cutting across the whole publishing ecosystem (e.g., see this presentation on the role of ethics in transformative scholarly impact). Without talking about these, our attempts at improving the system through tools and training may not be effective and sustainable. I touch on five of those issues.

1) Diverse factors shape ethics

Ethical standards could be as diverse as the publishing ecosystem itself. It is because these are guided and determined by norms, cultures, beliefs, logic/cognitive thinking, values, legacies, and resistance to change, for example, of a discipline/research community, or of a society/country/region. That’s why those who are accessing pirated journal articles might not find it unethical, since to them, scientific knowledge is supposed to be a global good and shouldn’t be behind expensive paywall. Or, asking for an PDF of a paper via social media or email might be thought of as no different from asking for a hardcopy reprint from an author, as we used to do in good old days. Or, paying peer reviewers for their services may be seen as a conflict of interest by almost all journals based in the Global North, but it would be an obvious practice in many regional journals, particularly in the Global South. Or, charging exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) may seem to be a viable business model to many reputed publishers, while many researchers may consider it no less than so-called predatory publishing.

In this highly connected world, we may think that the business of research or knowledge creation maintains a basic structure of research culture. But, in different parts of the world, unethical practices may perpetuate within relatively close groups which define their own research cultures. There, members could be playing the role of authors, editors, reviewers, and readers, making the publishing business self-sustaining, nurturing odd practices, like giving gift authorship to institutional heads or maintaining a group of coauthors who publish a series of related/unrelated articles with different first authors to increase article number. Or, creating an illicit circle of selling and buying authorship.

2) Ethical standards are dynamic

Standards change over time. A few years back, for example, in almost all disciplines, it was expected that authors would submit unpublished manuscripts to a journal to consider. Now, it is accepted that such a submitted manuscript can also be publicly available/ uploaded/ published on a preprint server. As a result, the same research results can now be found cited in different journal articles in more than one format (i.e., preprint and journal article), and journals are okay with it. Similarly, reviewers’ comments on a manuscript used to be strictly confidential — only to be read by the editors and the authors. Now, publicly disclosing reviewers’ names and full comments is praised as a good practice; good for transparency and accountability. And lately, publishers are still sceptical about how much AI they should allow authors or reviewers to use. While things have already changed from where they used to be in early 2023, they might be very different before we finish the first quarter of 2025. How responsive are publishers, journals, researchers, and institutions to these dynamics is a logical question to ask.

3) Not being transparent isn’t considered unethical

I often write about how large publishers remain secretive about their APC calculations. They ask us to trust that they are doing everything judiciously. And we do trust them. We may see that higher Journal Impact Factors often correspond with higher APCs, indicating a significant portion of the APC we pay is in fact going toward brand value. But, have you ever heard of any university administration or donor asking a principal investigator to collect quotations from journals for APCs, and to make comparative statements before selecting a journal to submit manuscript to, as they do in case of buying services or products from suppliers/vendors? It seems that the whole academic system is okay with paying publishers, whatever they ask for. They are running a not-so transparent system, self-claiming their own values, and making high profits out of the system, and no one  is asking if it is ethical or not. (A bit of trivia: As of December 7, 2024, there is no journal on the Clarivate’s Web of Science Master Journal List or in Scopus with the word ‘transparency’ in the title).

4) Criminal offenses hide behind ethics

Between May 2023 and November 2024, 184 journals got delisted by Clarivate because of failure to maintain production or editorial standards. Those journals created a brand built around having Journal Impact Factor to attract manuscripts, allowing them to bring in money through APCs and/or subscription fees. Now that they’ve lost their Impact Factors (and the reputation that comes with those rankings), who is going to pay for the financial, emotional, and reputational damages to authors and their institutions? Can an author/their institution (a plaintiff) file a case of violation of trust against a publisher (a defendant)? Which court of law would accept such a case? Or, will we simply sweep this issue under the carpet called ‘ethics’? Along the same lines, we often call some journals, which are hungry for our money without maintaining editorial or production standards, ‘predatory’. Can we call the 184 delisted journals ‘predatory journals’ since it is now official that they didn’t comply with scholarly publishing (or Clarivate’s) standards? Also, can we call the publishers of fake and hijacked journals or the managers of papermills ‘criminals’? I wonder, where does the line of violation of ethics end and that of crime begin?

5) Scholarly ecosystem nurtures unethical practices

Although we don’t publicly admit it, the sheer fabric of the academic ecosystem, of which the scholarly publishing industry is a part, supports unethical practices. For example, every year, more than five million research articles are published through numerous indexed and un-indexed journals and other avenues. But nobody questions what this staggering volume truly means in terms of quality and impact of research. The whole academic system apparently encourages quantity over quality and commodification of research communication in the name of measuring scientific progress. That’s why there is no mechanism to stop the so called bad, weak, or poor journals, except categorizing them in a lower rank or discontinuing their coverage in an index, and imposing a period of embargo on re-entry. The latter is nothing but a slap on the wrist, which might have short-term financial implications on the defaulters’ side. As long as the phenomenally perpetual philosophy called ‘publish or perish’ dictates scholarship, there will be no problem in receiving manuscripts for any journal. Scholarly publishing is thus an interesting example of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ in action — but here the term “fittest” refers to everyone: big commercial publishers, small society publishers with one journal, papermills, and unethical publishers, which can come in different sizes, shapes, and colors. Here, everybody is enjoying the wilderness of scholarly publishing by having their very own ecological niche and a sufficient pool of desperate authors and readers to extract nutrients from.

Scholarly publishing is built on trust. Unethical practices in it not only violate integrity, but also breach that trust among the core actors, as well as external stakeholders (e.g., the public, governments, and donors). As shown above, ethics is more than having the capacity to differentiate right from wrong by following principles and guidelines, having the capability to use toolkits and checklists, and learning from non-legally binding cases (e.g., those on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) website). We need to talk about the much bigger picture, and issues not often brought up in publishing ethics conversations, such as research culture, the changing face of ethics, justice, criminal offense, and ignoring transparency. Unless we start talking about these, we won’t be effectively able to address ethical concerns in academic publishing by making transformative changes.