Peer review was built to evaluate science. Not to detect fraud. But that’s increasingly the job that reviewers are being asked to do, putting both them and the entire scholarly ecosystem under mounting pressures.
Forward-looking publishers are now exploring a different approach: moving integrity checks to pre-submission, where they can be automated and applied consistently before editors or reviewers begin their work.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
- The three levels of fraudulent manipulation: papers, networks, systems.
- Your biggest threats, and what good upfront screening looks like.
- How to add checks without overhauling your existing editorial workflows.
Webinar summary
Harry Foster from ChronosHub led this panel with Jade Holt (IOP Publishing), Mary Miskin (Enago and Charlesworth), and Aashi Chaturvedi (ASM) to unpack a hard truth: peer review was never built to catch fraud. Reviewers are volunteers judging the science, not forensic investigators, so as fabricated data, paper mills, and manipulated images scale up, the job of catching them has to move somewhere else in the workflow. The panel compared notes on where that “somewhere else” actually is, and what it takes to make it work.
- Earlier isn’t always better. ASM moved image-integrity screening from acceptance to submission after a wave of paper-mill-style manuscripts, and it paid off. But every publisher on the panel agreed the right stage depends on the check and the journal. A review journal might need plagiarism screening on day one; a data-heavy journal can afford to wait until revision.
- Tools flag. People decide. Every panelist was clear that screening technology is a decision-support tool, not a decision-maker. The real bottleneck isn’t detection, it’s staffing to review what gets flagged. IOP’s research integrity team grew from half a person in 2019 to seven full-time staff, and getting the false-positive rate down matters just as much as catching more.
- Transparency builds buy-in on both sides. Editors weren’t the pushback the panel expected. Once they understood the scale of the problem, they welcomed the help. Authors get told upfront what’s being screened, too, so it reads less like a trap and more like a chance to fix a manuscript before it’s rejected.
Speakers
Moderator
Share this post
November 18, 2026
