Top Scientific Journal Ponders Tighter Publishing Guidelines

TUESDAY, Nov. 28, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- An independent committee has recommended that one of the world's leading scientific journals tighten its publishing guidelines a year after one of the biggest hoaxes in modern science appeared in the pages of the journal.

At the same time, the committee confirmed that the editors at Science had adequately followed publishing procedures that were in place when a group of South Korean scientists, led by Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, submitted two papers detailing the creation of stem cell lines from cloned embryos. The supposed cloning feat has since been declared a fraud, and the two papers have been retracted.

"We found that the procedures and standards of Science are typical of those at top-tier scientific journals, and these were followed with exceptional care. Editors went out of their way to ensure that the work reported was correct, and this paper probably received as much editorial care and attention as any I'm aware of," John I. Brauman, committee member, chairman of the journal's senior editorial board and J.G. Jackson- C.J. Wood professor of chemistry at Stanford University, said at a Tuesday news conference.

But the standards which led to what Brauman called a "distressing experience" just weren't good enough, journal staff asserted.

"The environment has changed for science. The report warns that there are increased incentives for work that is misleading or distorted by self-interest," said Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy. "We'll be working these new procedures out and will be seeking commentary from the scientific community."

Kennedy's editorial response to the report will appear in the Dec. 1 issue of Science.

Back in 2004 and 2005, Hwang's work was hailed as a breakthrough until it was revealed to have been faked. On Jan. 12, 2006, Science took the highly unusual step of issuing an editorial retraction of both papers.

The committee's report made several recommendations, including:

• Instituting a formal risk-assessment system to identify "high-risk" papers which would then be singled out for further scrutiny. (The journal received 12,000 submissions in 2005, accepting only about 8 percent of those). Red flags might include work that is unexpected or counterintuitive, work that bears on a "reasonably hot" set of policy choices such as stem cells or climate change, and work that has already attracted a lot of outside attention, Kennedy said.
• Developing a method to clarify the contributions and responsibilities of authors and co-authors. "We would like to know exactly what role each author had," Kennedy said. "We need to be a little bit reasonable about how much we do with respect to disclosing as part of the paper, but we want to know more than we now know about the specific roles of authors in a multiple-author paper." The Journal of the American Medical Association tightened its financial disclosure guidelines for authors last summer.
• Publishing more primary data to ensure that all relevant information is available to readers and reviewers.
• Collaborating with Nature and other high-profile journals to establish common standards for journal submissions.

It was not clear which recommendations would be adopted, or when. "We are still in the early stages of developing our response to this," Kennedy said.

Members of the committee also pointed out that no system to detect fraud can be foolproof.

"Reviewers are not policemen. If someone is deliberately trying to be misleading, it's going to be very hard to detect unless we go into the laboratory and try to reproduce experiments, and I don't think anybody is interested in doing that at the moment," Brauman said. "It's a matter of being protective rather than trying to reform the whole system."

"We're going to have to design a system that can be respected by the scientific community, does not provide an atmosphere of automatic mistrust and, nevertheless, enables us to evaluate papers, particularly papers that present substantial risk, in a more effective way, and that's going to take some work," Kennedy added.

More information

Visit Science to view the retraction.