Academic institutions and researchers are focused on a very narrow set of metrics for success. These come down to authorship on a publication being the most valued currency in academia because this is the primary measure towards career progression and academic prestige. Another industry resulting from these metrics is the international university ranking systems.
For example, it has opened up several exploitative industries, such as predatory publishers. Also on the rise are covert entities known as "paper mills". Many of the current problems with research integrity were highlighted by a 2024 study, which estimated that as many as one in seven papers is based on suspect data. A whole new area of research called forensic scientometrics has developed to try to identify some of these questionable publishing practices.
Working in an open environment helps research integrity in several ways. Making the data used for the work freely available means the work can be better scrutinised. Requiring clinical trials to be registered means drug studies that are unfavourable or show no effect cannot be buried. Reviewing the “instruction manuals” of how research studies are going to be conducted, called the protocols, before the studies are undertaken also ensures more rigorous research.
