Verification note: This piece was checked against Retraction Watch’s July 2, 2026 reporting (the primary source for the ACM story, including its direct quotes), publicly available research-integrity leadership pages at Springer Nature and Elsevier, and The Scientist’s July 2026 analysis of Retraction Watch Database statistics (as of April 8, 2026). Checked 10 July 2026.
What just happened
On July 2, 2026, Retraction Watch reported that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is creating a new position — director of research integrity — to be the organization’s central resource for detecting, investigating, and preventing research misconduct and ethical breaches across its journals, conference proceedings, magazines, and Digital Library. The new director will also serve as the primary liaison to editors, reviewers, authors, and partner organizations on publication ethics, AI transparency, and emerging integrity issues, working alongside ACM’s existing Ethics & Plagiarism Committee rather than replacing it.
ACM’s own director of publications, Scott Delman, was candid about why: over the last five years the organization has seen a rapid rise in misconduct allegations that its volunteer-based committee structure could not keep pace with, with individual cases sometimes taking over a year to resolve. Delman described the move as overdue — “we need an expert,” and ACM has been “long past due in having a dedicated director of research integrity who will be the central resource for ACM on all things relating to integrity,” per Retraction Watch’s reporting. ACM publishes more than 70 journals and proceedings for over 500 conferences a year, and has already had to retract entire conference proceedings over misconduct — including one covering more than 300 articles and another covering at least 26 — rather than resolve cases article by article.
Why this is a pattern, not an isolated hire
ACM is not the first scholarly publisher to conclude that misconduct investigation needs a dedicated, professionalized owner rather than an ad hoc editorial or volunteer-committee function — it’s catching up to a structure the largest commercial STM publishers built years earlier:
- Springer Nature appointed Chris Graf as its Research Integrity Director in 2021 — notably, a former COPE co-chair — leading a standing team responsible for the publisher’s research-integrity strategy across its journal portfolio.
- Elsevier established a Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics Center of Expertise in 2013, currently led by Sarah Jenkins as Director of Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics.
What makes ACM’s case a useful data point rather than a one-off staffing story is the underlying volume problem it points to. Per The Scientist’s July 2026 analysis of Retraction Watch Database figures (as of April 8, 2026), scientific misconduct — falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and related ethical violations — now accounts for roughly 60% of tracked retractions, and one in five retracted health-science and basic-life-science articles between 2016 and 2025 originated from a paper mill. Annual retraction counts have grown sharply this decade (helped, in part, by a 2023 spike when the then-publisher Hindawi retracted thousands of paper-mill-linked articles in a single year) — even though, as the same analysis notes, retractions still represent under 1% of the literature overall. A caseload that scales that quickly outgrows a volunteer committee model quickly, which is the structural problem Delman described for ACM.
What this means for research administration and journal-adjacent offices
For CASRAI’s audience — research administrators, sponsored-programs offices, and the institutional staff who field misconduct allegations or coordinate with publishers during an investigation — the practical takeaways are less about any single hire and more about what a dedicated integrity office changes on the process side:
- A named point of contact. Institutions and authors dealing with an ACM-published misconduct concern will, going forward, have a specific role to route it to rather than an editor or ad hoc committee — mirroring how ORI functions as a named point of contact on the federal side for PHS-funded research.
- Faster, more consistent process. A dedicated, professionalized function is a direct response to the multi-year case backlog Delman described — institutions should expect (and can reasonably ask about) more predictable investigation timelines going forward, though ACM has not published a specific service-level target.
- Convergence with existing frameworks. None of this changes the underlying process a case follows once it’s substantiated — ACM, like Springer Nature and Elsevier, still operates within the retraction and correction framework COPE’s guidelines and flowcharts describe, and cases involving federally funded research still fall under ORI’s separate jurisdiction where applicable.
What to watch
ACM has not yet named a hire or published a start date, nor released a formal policy document accompanying the new role (this piece will be updated if either happens). Worth watching for: whether ACM publishes updated turnaround-time data once the role is filled, whether other large scholarly societies with own-brand publishing operations (IEEE, ACS, AIP Publishing, and similar) follow with comparable dedicated roles, and whether ACM’s approach to paper-mill detection specifically is folded into the new director’s remit given the tooling (e.g., the STM Integrity Hub) increasingly used industry-wide for pre-publication screening.
