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This Peer Review Week, Yousuf Al-Mousawi, Senior Editorial Assistant at F1000, explores how Gates Open Research creates and supports trust in research whilst upholding research integrity. 

Simply put, research integrity refers to conducting research in the proper way to enable others to have confidence in the work produced – this entails gathering sufficient data using the appropriate methods, presenting information and communicating the results effectively, and making interpretations that can be justified based on the results. In addition, research integrity also requires transparency (for example, by the authors and peer-reviewers declaring any potential conflicts of interest) and ensuring that all research conducted is ethical; human and animal test subjects as well as the environment must be treated appropriately.  
 
Here at Gates Open Research, we are committed to upholding research integrity by having an open and transparent peer-review model whereby reviewers, as well as readers from the wider scientific community, are able to view published research, assess the quality and rigor of the work and make sure that the correct scientific procedures have been followed. It is also crucial to us that the peer review process is thorough, objective and impartial. 

Pre-publication checks supporting research integrity and quality 

All submissions undergo a series of comprehensive checks before publication on Gates Open Research. These checks are designed to ensure that research published on the Platform meets our basic requirements around authorship, ethics, and data. 

Our in-house editorial team carefully review all submissions to ensure that each article: 

What are the ethics and research integrity concerns that our editorial checks aim to tackle? 

Our editorial checks aim to ensure that all ethical guidelines involving the research have been met – for example, that human test subjects have given consent to participate in the study and have the relevant results shared, and that all test subjects and the environment have been treated appropriately. The editorial team checks each submission for this and asks authors to provide the relevant confirmation statements. Reviewers are also able to point out any instances where they believe ethical guidelines may have been breached.  
 
Our editorial checks also aim to tackle concerns with potential conflicts of interest – we do not permit significant conflicts of interest between the authors and reviewers to ensure the fairness and validity of the peer-review process. To support this, reviewers are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest that they have with any of the authors or other aspects of the article (e.g. products involved).  
 
Furthermore, our publication model aims to ensure that research has been conducted correctly by having a comprehensive peer review process that is tailored to each different article type. Reviewers are asked to answer a set of Reviewer Questions which are tailored to the article type being reviewed.  

How does the post-publication, open peer review model on Gates Open Research support research integrity?  

The open peer review model, including the open user commenting system, allows the involvement of the wider scholarly community as well as our editorial team in assessing the research, which greatly helps us to uphold research integrity.  
 
As well as allowing a more thorough review of the scientific content of the article, the open commenting system has additional benefits. For example, although we thoroughly check reviewers for potential conflicts of interest before they are invited to review, and even though we ask reviewers to let us know of any potential conflicts of interest before they submit their review, in rare cases, a reviewer may not disclose all of their potential conflicts of interest (whether this was intentionally dishonest, or otherwise, such as if they did not believe the conflict would be significant enough to be worth disclosing). Either way, this threatens to compromise research integrity, especially if the undisclosed conflict of interest is a source of reviewer bias that affects the objectiveness of their review. 
 
As Gates Open Research’s open peer review model requires that reviewer identities are revealed, other reviewers/readers are able to contact the editorial team if they read a published report and are aware of an undisclosed conflict of interest. In such cases previously, our editorial team have contacted the reviewer in question to confirm the concerns and if necessary, ask them to provide an updated conflict of interest statement to be retrospectively added to their peer-review report (with an editorial note) for transparency. This helps to maintain research integrity. 

At Gates Open Research, we aim to create and support trust in research by upholding research integrity at every step of the way. With rigorous pre-publication checks and open post-publication peer review, researchers can publish their findings rapidly without compromising research integrity.