This month (May 2017) there will be two important anniversaries related to research integrity. The first is the 20 year anniversary of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), celebrated at COPE’s European annual meeting in London, UK, on May 25. The second marks 10 years since the first World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007—to be held at the fifth WCRI in Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 28–31. More than 600 delegates will gather and present research on research integrity and debate current policies and initiatives, progress, and difficulties. The conference theme is transparency and accountability. So what have these initiatives and organisations achieved and what is the current state of research integrity?

Compared with 20 years ago there is undoubtedly more discussion and awareness of research misconduct. There is more research into research integrity and inappropriate research practice. And there is more guidance and support for those researchers, funders, institutions, and journals that want to have good policies, practices, and processes in place. However, there are depressingly familiar examples that show we still have a long way to go to strengthen research integrity and publication ethics. Every day, dubious new journals and conference organisers solicit papers and presentations for a fee. The rise of such predatory journals and conferences is a disappointingly unsavoury by-product of the open access business model.
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On April 20, the publisher Springer retracted a record 107 papers from one journal (Tumor Biology) because they had been accepted after fake peer review. These papers were discovered after additional screening as a consequence of an earlier round of retractions, but clearly stronger editorial practices could have detected these fatal flaws before publication. And last week, the investigators of the Treatment of Preserved Cardiac Function Heart Failure with an Aldosterone Antagonist (TOPCAT) trial, originally published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014, concluded in a correspondence letter in the journal that after further experiments the findings “arouse concerns regarding study conduct in Russia, and by implication, Georgia”—an example of a multicountry collaboration gone wrong.
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