Does a digital workflow make it easier to detect ethical breeches in peer review?
The Internet has changed everything. You can be sitting at your desk in Birmingham, Alabama, while having a conversation in real time with a colleague in Birmingham, United Kingdom, exchanging not only words and ideas, but also photographs, data sets and manuscripts. The Internet has also changed the way science is done, particularly when it comes to publication. Manuscripts are now submitted, reviewed and authors notified electronically. But although the efficiency and speed of the peer-review process has increased, a set of attendant issues has arisen. Specifically, it is now easier to detect breaches of ethical behaviour than ever before. As evidence, the number of reported ethical problems involving publications of the American Physiological Society (in 14 separate journals) rocketed from an average of less than one a year before 1999 to more than 50 a year in 2004, when all of the society’s publications became available online1. Whether this is coincidental or causal is open to de
