CASRAI Dictionary

Author: MCP Service

  • UKRI COVID Grant Extensions: The CoA Audit Trail

    UKRI COVID grant extensions — formally the UKRI COVID-19 Grant Extension Allocation (CoA) — were a costed, time-boxed funding mechanism used between 2020 and 2021 to extend research and fellowship awards disrupted by the pandemic. Although the scheme closed to new applications years ago, its expenditure still falls inside institutional audit cycles, because UKRI’s funding assurance reviews and grant-condition checks operate on multi-year lookback windows, not calendar-year cut-offs.

    The CoA is defined by UKRI as a supplementary, costed award — distinct from an ordinary no-cost extension — issued to sustain UKRI grant-funded research and fellowships affected by the pandemic, subject to its own terms, conditions and reporting deadlines.

    What was the UKRI COVID-19 Grant Extension Allocation (CoA)?

    The CoA ran from 2020 into 2021 as UKRI’s principal response to pandemic-related disruption of active grants. UKRI’s own FAQ describes its aim as providing “UK organisations with resources to sustain UKRI grant-funded research and fellowships affected by” the pandemic. Unlike a routine no-cost extension, which extends time only, the CoA was a genuine additional award: UKRI’s terms and conditions state plainly that “extensions of CoA can only be offered in specific circumstances and will be supported through an additional award.”

    A related, narrower scheme targeted doctoral students specifically. In February 2021, a written ministerial statement to Parliament confirmed £44 million of urgent funding for up to six-month extensions for PhD students in their final year unable to complete their studies. UKRI later reported a further £19 million committed under the Doctoral Extensions Policy Phase 2 Awards, published in a full report dated February 2025, covering students who could not mitigate pandemic delays through the initial phase of support.

    Both strands closed to new applications once their windows lapsed, but institutions that drew on either allocation retained reporting obligations — a Final Report and a Final Expenditure Statement — that created the audit trail now being revisited.

    Why UKRI COVID grant extensions still surface in institutional audits

    Institutional audits and UKRI funding-assurance reviews do not treat 2020-21 expenditure as closed simply because the pandemic has receded. Grant conditions require institutions to retain records for a defined period after a grant’s Final Expenditure Statement, and CoA-funded costs sit inside exactly the same retention and eligibility rules as any other award expenditure.

    Three forces keep the CoA in scope for auditors in 2026:

    • Retention windows outlast the news cycle. Record-retention obligations attached to a grant run from the Final Expenditure Statement date, not from the original award date — so CoA awards accepted late in the scheme can still be inside their retention period.
    • Funding assurance reviews are cyclical, not one-off. UKRI’s assurance activity revisits institutional financial control on a rolling basis, which means expenditure from 2020-21 can legitimately fall inside a review conducted years later.
    • The CoA was a bespoke instrument, so its rules are easy to misapply. Because the CoA was a costed additional award rather than a standard no-cost extension, staff costs, equipment, and consumables charged against it must be tested against the CoA-specific terms and conditions — not the general no-cost-extension rules that apply to most current requests. Institutional audit teams that apply the wrong rule set are the most common source of a finding.

    CoA vs a standard no-cost extension: what changed under UKRI grant conditions

    The distinction between the CoA and today’s ordinary no-cost extension is the single most consequential fact for an audit reviewing pandemic-era files, and it is easy to lose years after the event.

    Feature UKRI COVID-19 Grant Extension Allocation (CoA) Standard no-cost extension (current UKRI grant conditions)
    Funding basis Costed — supported through an additional award No additional cost; time only
    Maximum duration Case-by-case, tied to pandemic disruption Up to 6 months over the grant’s lifetime for non-people-related reasons; up to the actual delay for people-related reasons (per UKRI guidance updated 7 May 2026)
    Application status Closed since 2021 Open, ongoing route via the grant’s award system
    Reporting obligation Final Report plus Final Expenditure Statement, due by end of 2021 Standard Final Expenditure Statement at the (extended) grant end date

    UKRI’s current guidance on requesting a change to a project confirms the modern no-cost-extension rule directly: “no-cost extensions due to non-people related reasons may not exceed six months over the lifetime of the grant, unless exceptions apply.” Extensions justified by people-related reasons — parental leave, sick leave, recruitment delay — may instead run for the actual length of the delay. Neither rule was designed with the CoA’s bespoke, costed structure in mind, which is exactly why an auditor applying today’s no-cost-extension test to a 2020-21 CoA award will misclassify the expenditure.

    What documentation satisfies auditors reviewing CoA-funded extensions

    Research offices preparing for a funding-assurance visit or an institutional audit that touches pandemic-era grants should be able to produce, for each CoA award:

    1. The original CoA award letter or additional-award confirmation, showing it was issued as a costed extension rather than a no-cost one.
    2. The stated justification for the extension, tied to a specific pandemic-related circumstance rather than a general reference to COVID-19.
    3. Timesheets or equivalent evidence for any staff costs charged against the additional award.
    4. The Final Report and Final Expenditure Statement submitted at scheme close, plus any correspondence extending those deadlines.
    5. A clear cross-reference showing which grant conditions — CoA-specific or standard — governed each cost line, so a reviewer does not default to the wrong rule set.

    Where a doctoral extension was funded under the separate £44 million or £19 million allocations described above, the same principle applies: keep the scheme-specific approval letter alongside the standard studentship file, because the eligibility criteria for those cohorts differ from both the CoA and the ordinary no-cost extension.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the UKRI COVID-19 Grant Extension Allocation (CoA)?

    The CoA was a costed, additional UKRI award — not a standard no-cost extension — issued between 2020 and 2021 to sustain grant-funded research and fellowships disrupted by the pandemic. It closed to new applications once its funding window ended, but its terms still govern how that historic expenditure must be assessed in an audit.

    How long can a UKRI no-cost extension run under current grant conditions?

    Under UKRI guidance current as of May 2026, a no-cost extension for non-people-related reasons may not exceed six months over the lifetime of the grant, unless exceptions apply. Extensions justified by people-related reasons, such as parental or sick leave, may instead run for the length of the actual delay.

    Why do auditors still ask about COVID-era grant extensions?

    Grant record-retention obligations run from the Final Expenditure Statement date, and UKRI’s funding-assurance reviews revisit institutional financial control on a rolling cycle. Both mean CoA-funded expenditure from 2020-21 can still fall legitimately inside a current review, especially where cost lines were charged under bespoke, non-standard terms.

    Can an institution still apply for a new CoA extension today?

    No. The CoA closed to new applications once its funding window lapsed in 2021. Institutions cannot open new CoA claims; the only live task is ensuring historic CoA expenditure and its supporting evidence remain correctly documented against the scheme’s original, costed terms.

    For research offices, the practical implication is straightforward: pandemic-era grant files are not a closed chapter simply because the news cycle has moved on. Institutions that keep the CoA’s costed, bespoke terms clearly separated from today’s standard no-cost-extension rules — and can point an auditor to the correct rule set for each historic cost line — are the ones that clear a funding-assurance review without a finding. That discipline, more than any single retained document, is what the legacy of the CoA now demands of institutional grant administration.

    Research offices building broader institutional compliance capability may also find it useful to review general research administration practice alongside funder-specific rules such as these.

  • UKRI Grant Tracker vs Funding Finder: Which to Use

    The UKRI grant tracker — officially named Gateway to Research (GtR) — is UKRI’s public, post-award database of funded projects, while Funding Finder is the pre-award tool for discovering open competitions. Use GtR to see what has already been funded and by whom; use Funding Finder to find and apply for a live opportunity. Confusing the two wastes time at both ends of the grant lifecycle.

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s searchable record of research and innovation projects it has already funded, spanning UKRI’s seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK.

    What Is the UKRI Grant Tracker (Gateway to Research)?

    Gateway to Research (GtR), hosted at gtr.ukri.org, is UKRI’s public gateway onto publicly funded research. It is a retrospective, analytical tool, not a submission portal: researchers, administrators and journalists use it to look up who has already received UKRI funding, for what, and with which collaborators.

    GtR supports structured search syntax rather than a simple keyword box. Search terms can be combined with capitalised Boolean operators — AND, OR, and by implication exclusion logic — and exact phrases can be isolated by wrapping them in quotation marks (for example, “big data”). This makes GtR closer to a bibliometric research tool than a funding-opportunity search engine, and it is the correct destination when the underlying question is “who funds this kind of work” rather than “how do I apply for funding.”

    • Records cover projects across all seven UKRI research councils, Research England and Innovate UK.
    • Each project record can include the funded organisation, the named investigators, and linked outputs where reported.
    • GtR is read-only: it has no application or sign-in function, and cannot be used to submit a bid.

    What Is UKRI Funding Finder and How Does It Differ?

    UKRI Funding Finder, at ukri.org/opportunity, is the live, forward-looking search tool for current and upcoming funding competitions. Where GtR looks backwards at what has already been awarded, Funding Finder looks forwards at what can still be applied for. Each listing states eligibility criteria, assessment approach, and — increasingly — whether the call is open to all applicants or restricted to invited organisations.

    At the time of research for this article, Funding Finder listed 124 open opportunities across UKRI’s councils, spanning fields from quantum computing hardware to obesity research and zero-emission vehicle manufacturing. Listings can be sorted by publication date, opening date or closing date, and results can be followed via an RSS feed for teams monitoring a discipline continuously. Opportunities that closed before 20 September 2020 are not held on the live site; UKRI directs users to the UK Government Web Archive for that historical record — a detail that matters for administrators auditing older award terms.

    Which Tool Should You Use at Each Stage of the Grant Lifecycle?

    The two tools map cleanly onto opposite ends of the grant lifecycle. Funding Finder belongs to the pre-award, opportunity-scouting stage; GtR belongs to the post-award, evidence and landscape-analysis stage. Treating them as interchangeable is the single most common source of wasted searches reported by research office staff.

    Grant lifecycle stage Correct tool Primary purpose Typical user
    Scoping a new proposal Funding Finder Find open competitions, deadlines, eligibility Principal investigators, research development staff
    Benchmarking success rates or prior awards in a field Gateway to Research (GtR) Analyse what UKRI has already funded and where Research strategy and analysis teams
    Preparing and submitting an application UKRI Funding Service Complete, submit and track an application through assessment Applicants and research office administrators
    Identifying potential collaborators or reviewers Gateway to Research (GtR) Search funded projects by investigator or organisation Principal investigators, partnership teams
    Reporting institutional funding landscape to leadership Gateway to Research (GtR) Extract award data and trends across councils Research administrators, PVC Research offices

    In practice, a full application cycle touches all three UKRI digital services in sequence: Funding Finder to find the call, the UKRI Funding Service to submit and monitor the application, and GtR afterwards — both to check the eventual public record of the award and to inform the next round of proposal scoping.

    Where Does the UKRI Funding Service Fit In?

    The UKRI Funding Service, at funding-service.ukri.org, is a third, distinct property that is frequently conflated with both GtR and Funding Finder. It is the sign-in application portal: the system used to prepare, submit and monitor a funding application once a suitable opportunity has been identified via Funding Finder.

    Administrators searching for uk research and innovation ukri funding service are usually trying to reach this sign-in and case-tracking system, not the public search tools. This is a navigational query, and getting the destination wrong at this stage delays submission rather than discovery — a costlier mistake than a slow search on GtR or Funding Finder.

    • Funding Finder — discover the opportunity (no account needed).
    • UKRI Funding Service — sign in, complete the form, submit, and track assessment status (account required).
    • Gateway to Research — see the public record once the award is live (no account needed).

    Common Questions About UKRI’s Grant Tools

    What is the UKRI grant tracker used for?

    The UKRI grant tracker, Gateway to Research, is used to look up already-funded projects across UKRI’s councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Research offices use it for landscape analysis, benchmarking prior awards in a field, and identifying named investigators or partner organisations before submitting a related proposal.

    Is UKRI Funding Finder the same as Gateway to Research?

    No. Funding Finder lists open, forward-looking competitions for researchers still seeking funding, while Gateway to Research is a retrospective public database of projects UKRI has already awarded. They serve opposite ends of the same lifecycle and are maintained as separate services with separate URLs.

    How do I track a UKRI grant after it has been awarded?

    Once a grant is live, its public record — including the funded organisation and lead investigator — typically appears on Gateway to Research. Day-to-day case management, reporting obligations and correspondence for an active award are instead handled through the UKRI Funding Service account, not GtR.

    Do I need an account to search UKRI Funding Finder?

    No account is required to browse or search Funding Finder listings, including filtering by opening or closing date. An account on the separate UKRI Funding Service is only required at the point of actually starting, saving or submitting an application.

    Key Takeaways for Research Administrators

    The practical rule is straightforward: search Funding Finder for what can still be won, consult Gateway to Research for what has already been won, and use the UKRI Funding Service to actually submit and manage the application in between. Bookmarking all three separately — rather than treating “the UKRI grant tracker” as a single catch-all site — removes the single most common navigation error research offices report when supporting first-time applicants.

    As UKRI continues to consolidate its digital services, research administration teams should expect closer integration between these platforms, but the underlying separation of pre-award discovery, application management and post-award transparency is unlikely to disappear, since each serves a distinct statutory and operational purpose. Institutions building internal guidance for applicants — as part of broader research administration support — should signpost all three tools explicitly rather than defaulting to whichever one appears first in a search engine.

  • Famous Cases of Research Misconduct in India: Building Investigation Capacity

    India has produced a long run of documented research misconduct cases — plagiarism by university vice-chancellors, data manipulation at premier institutes, and mass retractions from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) — because the country has no statutory equivalent of the US Office of Research Integrity. Since 2018, that gap has started closing through UGC regulations, an ICMR ethics policy, and India’s first dedicated Research Integrity Office, opened in Bengaluru in 2022.

    Research misconduct is the fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism of data or authorship in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. In India, the term also commonly extends to duplicate (“self-plagiarism”) publication and fraudulent peer review, both of which feature heavily in the country’s retraction record.

    This article sets out the famous cases of research misconduct in india that shaped public and regulatory attention, then examines — in more depth than the case lists alone provide — the specific institutional mechanisms India has built since 2018 to investigate and deter misconduct, benchmarked against the UK’s comparable framework.

    What is research misconduct, and how common is it in India?

    Research misconduct covers fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and — in India’s documented record — duplicate publication and compromised peer review. India does not operate a statutory oversight body comparable to the US Office of Research Integrity, so cases are typically investigated on an ad-hoc basis by institutional committees, independent enquiry panels, or journal editors, often only after a public complaint or media report triggers action.

    Retraction volume gives a rough proxy for scale. An analysis by the volunteer watchdog Indian Research Watch (IRW), drawing on the Retraction Watch database, found that 58 papers authored or co-authored by faculty across 12 of India’s 23 IITs were retracted for plagiarism or duplicate publication between 2006 and 2023 — compared with three retractions from Stanford, two from Princeton, five from Oxford, five from Cambridge, and ten from Tsinghua over the same period. IRW also recorded a 2.5-fold surge in Indian institutional retractions in 2020–2022 compared with 2017–2019.

    Which cases shaped India’s research misconduct record?

    A handful of cases became reference points for how India investigates — and fails to investigate — misconduct allegations.

    • B.S. Rajput, Kumaon University (2002–2003): the vice-chancellor was accused by Indian and international physicists, including a Nobel laureate co-signatory, of plagiarising a paper from a Stanford researcher. A committee led by retired judge Justice S.R. Singh upheld the charge in February 2003, and Rajput resigned immediately.
    • Gopal Kundu, National Centre for Cell Science, Pune (2006–2010): an anonymous complaint alleged data misrepresentation in a Journal of Biological Chemistry paper. The journal withdrew the paper in 2007, and the Indian Academy of Sciences barred Kundu from its activities for three years following an internal ethics review in 2010.
    • Ashok Kumar, IIT Kanpur (2010): two review articles in Biotechnology Advances were retracted for extensive copying, prompting the Society for Scientific Values to publicly reprimand several IITs over lax plagiarism handling that year.
    • P. Chiranjeevi, Sri Venkateswara University (2004–2008): a chemistry professor was found to have plagiarised content across roughly 70 papers; the university barred him from examination duties, research guidance, and further promotion.
    • Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo, Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar (2013): five papers in Acta Biomaterialia were retracted for serial self-plagiarism, data manipulation, and falsification of results.

    These cases share a pattern: detection came from external whistleblowers, journal editors, or watchdog groups rather than routine institutional audit — the exact gap India’s newer capacity-building measures target.

    How are Indian institutions building investigation capacity?

    Since 2018, national regulators and individual institutions have begun replacing ad-hoc responses with defined procedures, though implementation remains uneven across India’s roughly 1,000-plus universities.

    • UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018: the University Grants Commission’s regulation defines plagiarism thresholds by similarity-index band and prescribes tiered penalties, from reworking a manuscript to debarment from supervising research.
    • Mandatory Research and Publication Ethics (RPE) training: UGC rules require a two-credit RPE course for all PhD scholars, intended to instil ethical practice before misconduct occurs rather than only punishing it afterward.
    • UGC-CARE (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics): maintains a vetted journal list to steer researchers away from predatory publications that facilitate low-scrutiny misconduct.
    • ICMR research integrity policy: the Indian Council of Medical Research has its own publication-ethics and research-integrity policy governing biomedical research, alongside its National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research.
    • India’s first dedicated Research Integrity Office: in 2022, the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru jointly established India’s first standing Research Integrity Office, tasked with policy-setting, data archiving, training, and case investigation — a structural model still rare outside this campus.
    • Independent watchdogs: the Society for Scientific Values, active since the 1980s, and Indian Research Watch, founded in 2022 by data scientist Achal Agrawal, continue to supply the external scrutiny that formal bodies have not yet fully absorbed.

    How does India’s framework compare with the UK’s?

    The UK’s research misconduct architecture is older and more codified, offering a useful benchmark for what a mature system looks like once statutory pressure and funder mandates are added.

    Feature India United Kingdom
    Core guidance document UGC 2018 Regulations; ICMR research integrity policy Universities UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity (2019 revision)
    Statutory oversight body None — no equivalent to the US Office of Research Integrity None — UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) is advisory, not statutory
    Institutional requirement Ethics/misconduct committees, variably implemented Named research integrity lead plus an annual public statement to funders
    Investigation trigger Usually a whistleblower complaint or media report Defined internal procedure for the investigation of misconduct in research, often COPE-aligned, with escalation routes to funders

    The comparison shows India’s 2018–2022 reforms following a similar path the UK walked earlier — moving from voluntary good practice toward named responsibility and funder-linked reporting — but roughly a decade behind in institutional coverage.

    Frequently asked questions

    What are some examples of research misconduct?

    Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are the three core categories recognised internationally. In India’s record, this has manifested as copied text and images, manipulated western blot data, duplicate (“self-plagiarised”) publication, and fraudulent peer review used to fast-track weak manuscripts into print.

    What are the 5 unethical practices in research?

    The five widely cited categories are falsification of data, failure to credit others, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, and biased design or interpretation driven by outside influence. Indian cases documented above illustrate the first three most frequently, particularly plagiarism and data falsification.

    What are the implications for institutions, publishers, and funders?

    For Indian institutions, the direction is toward standing capacity rather than reactive committees: named integrity offices, mandatory ethics training, and journal-quality filtering via UGC-CARE. For international publishers and funders working with Indian co-authors, the retraction data signal a need for stronger pre-publication screening rather than reliance on post-hoc whistleblowing. For research administrators globally, India’s experience underscores a broader lesson also visible in research administration practice elsewhere: investigation procedures only function once an institution has a named owner, a documented process, and independence from the department under review.

    Conclusion: the road ahead

    India’s famous research misconduct cases exposed a structural gap: no statutory body, uneven institutional follow-through, and detection driven mostly by outsiders. The 2018 UGC regulations, ICMR’s integrity policy, mandatory RPE training, and the 2022 inStem/NCBS Research Integrity Office mark a genuine shift toward standing investigation capacity. Whether that capacity scales beyond a handful of leading institutions to India’s broader university system remains the open question for the next decade.

  • Research Misconduct vs Misbehaviour: FFP vs QRPs

    Research misconduct is a narrow, formally sanctionable transgression — fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly — while research misbehaviour is the much broader, informally policed category of questionable research practices (QRPs) that fall short of that threshold but still corrode trust in the research record. Confusing the two matters: one triggers a formal investigation and possible dismissal or retraction; the other typically triggers correction, training, or an editorial note.

    This distinction between research misbehavior and research misconduct is not academic hair-splitting. Regulators, universities, funders, and journal editors all apply a threshold test before they open a formal case, and where that line sits differs by jurisdiction. Research misconduct is fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, reviewing, or reporting research, committed with intent, knowledge, or recklessness — a definition codified in the United States under 42 CFR Part 93 and echoed, with local variation, across UK, European, and international frameworks.

    What is research misconduct? The formal FFP test

    Research misconduct has a narrow, legalistic definition. In the United States, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — part of the Department of Health and Human Services — defines it under 42 CFR Part 93 as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. Each term is precisely scoped: fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them; falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data so the research record is misrepresented; plagiarism is appropriating another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without appropriate credit.

    Crucially, ORI’s definition explicitly excludes honest error or genuine differences of opinion. A finding of misconduct also requires that the act was committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly — not through a documented, defensible mistake. This intent threshold is what separates misconduct from misbehaviour, and it is the single fact most competitor explainers state without ever mapping it against a second jurisdiction.

    What is research misbehaviour? Where QRPs fit

    Research misbehaviour is an umbrella term for actions that deviate from responsible research practice without meeting the fabrication-falsification-plagiarism bar. It is most often used interchangeably with “questionable research practices” (QRPs) — a term formalised in the UK’s Concordat to Support Research Integrity, first published by Universities UK in 2012 and revised in 2019, which defines QRPs as “minor infractions or research practices, including avoidable errors, which fall short of the definition of intentional research misconduct.”

    Common QRPs include selective reporting of favourable results, “p-hacking” data until a significant finding emerges, HARKing (presenting a post-hoc hypothesis as though it were pre-registered), salami-slicing a single dataset into multiple papers, and inappropriate authorship allocation. A 2009 meta-analysis by Daniele Fanelli, published in PLoS ONE, found that on average only 1.97% of surveyed scientists admitted to fabricating or falsifying data at least once — but up to 33.7% admitted to other questionable research practices, and the figure rose sharply when respondents were asked about colleagues’ behaviour rather than their own. That roughly seventeen-fold gap is the empirical case for treating misbehaviour as a distinct, much larger risk surface than misconduct.

    Authorship disputes sit squarely in this grey zone. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and consistent use of its CRediT contributor roles is one of the more effective structural fixes institutions have for the ghost- and guest-authorship misbehaviours that recur in authorship disputes.

    How do regulators draw the line?

    No single global definition governs the misconduct/misbehaviour boundary. Each major framework sets its own threshold language, and the differences are consequential for cross-border collaborations and multi-national author teams.

    Framework / body Core threshold language Legal or policy basis Standard of intent
    US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) Fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) 42 CFR Part 93 Intentional, knowing, or reckless
    UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity “Behaviours that deliberately or recklessly fall short of the standards expected” Universities UK Concordat (2012, rev. 2019) Deliberate or reckless
    World Health Organization “Wrongdoing” — FFP plus misrepresentation and other fraudulent behaviour WHO Code of Conduct for Research Intentional, knowing, or reckless
    Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Overlapping guidance distinguishing retraction-triggering misconduct from correction-triggering QRPs COPE flowcharts and guidelines for editors Proportionate to severity and evidence

    Notice the pattern: every framework anchors misconduct to intent or recklessness, and every framework treats everything short of that — errors, sloppy practice, grey-zone shortcuts — as a separate, lower-tier category, whether it is called a QRP, an “avoidable error,” or simply “wrongdoing” of a lesser kind.

    What happens after a finding? Sanctions compared

    The practical consequence of the misconduct/misbehaviour distinction is procedural. A misconduct finding typically follows a formal, panel-based investigation and can result in retraction, funding debarment, employment termination, or referral to a professional regulator. A misbehaviour or QRP finding more commonly results in a correction to the published record, mandatory training, enhanced supervision, or an editorial expression of concern — remedial rather than punitive action.

    • Misconduct outcomes: retraction, debarment from funding, dismissal, professional sanction, referral to law enforcement in extreme cases.
    • Misbehaviour/QRP outcomes: correction or erratum, mandatory research-integrity training, revised authorship credit, closer supervisory oversight.
    • Shared consequence: both can damage institutional reputation and require correction of the scholarly record, which is why UKRIO and equivalent bodies investigate both under a shared procedural umbrella even though the findings differ.

    Research institutions and research administration offices increasingly triage complaints against this two-tier structure before deciding whether a matter warrants a full misconduct panel or a lighter-touch integrity review — a proportionality principle that COPE explicitly recommends to journal editors handling post-publication concerns.

    Common questions about misconduct and misbehaviour

    What are the three types of research misconduct?

    Under the US federal definition, the three types are fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating processes or altering data so the record misrepresents what occurred), and plagiarism (appropriating others’ ideas, words, or results without credit). Together these form the FFP standard used by ORI and mirrored internationally.

    What are the five unethical practices most often cited in research ethics literature?

    A widely cited framework lists falsification of data, failure to credit others, plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and biased design or interpretation driven by outside influence. Some of these meet the formal misconduct threshold; others, like undisclosed conflicts, more often sit in the misbehaviour category depending on intent and severity.

    What is research misbehaviour, precisely?

    Research misbehaviour is any deviation from responsible research conduct — including questionable research practices and avoidable errors — that falls short of intentional fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. It is a broader, less formally policed category than misconduct, typically addressed through correction and training rather than disciplinary panels.

    What actions count as research misconduct in UK institutional policy?

    UK institutional policies, following the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, typically list plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, breaching ethical or legal research requirements, proceeding without required approvals, and failing to manage conflicts of interest as research misconduct, provided the conduct was deliberate or reckless rather than an honest error.

    Implications for institutions and research administrators

    For research administrators, publishers, and funders, the practical task is triage: distinguishing an honest error or a QRP from conduct that meets the intent threshold for a formal misconduct investigation, before committing to a resource-intensive panel process. Institutions that document this distinction clearly in their code of practice — and train staff and early-career researchers on where the line sits — reduce both the number of misdirected formal investigations and the risk of under-reacting to genuine misconduct.

    As research-integrity offices, funders, and publishers converge on shared vocabulary for this spectrum, consistent taxonomy work — from CRediT-style contributor attribution to standardised institutional definitions — will keep doing more to prevent misbehaviour from escalating into misconduct than any single enforcement action can.

  • How Research Misconduct in Engineering Differs

    Research misconduct in engineering is fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism involving structural test data, materials properties, or simulation results — but unlike biomedical misconduct, it is judged against physical, re-testable evidence and can trigger professional-licence discipline, not just retraction. Where biomedical fraud is typically uncovered through statistical forensics on data that cannot be re-run on the same human subjects, engineering fraud is frequently caught — and proven — by re-testing the actual material, structure, or component in question.

    Most misconduct coverage focuses on biomedicine and psychology, where retractions and clinical-trial scandals dominate. Engineering misconduct is less visible but carries a distinct evidentiary logic, a distinct enforcement path through licensing bodies, and a distinct risk profile: infrastructure and physical safety rather than patient health. This analysis sets out what makes engineering cases different.

    What Is Research Misconduct in Engineering?

    Research misconduct is fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting results, as defined by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the federal body overseeing Public Health Service-funded research. This definition applies without modification to engineering research; what changes is the object being faked.

    In engineering, misconduct usually touches quantifiable physical properties: yield strength, fatigue-cycle counts, thermal tolerance, load-bearing capacity, corrosion resistance, or finite-element simulation outputs. A fabricated result in this domain is not an abstract statistical artefact — it is a claim about whether a material or structure will hold under real load. That distinction shapes every part of how allegations are investigated and resolved.

    The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) supplies the procedural backbone most engineering journals use to handle allegations, via its published core practices and case-specific flowcharts covering fabricated data, image manipulation, plagiarism, authorship disputes, and undisclosed conflicts of interest.

    Why Engineering’s Evidentiary Standards Differ From Biomedicine’s

    Engineering misconduct investigations lean on re-testable physical evidence far more than biomedical ones do. A disputed tensile-strength figure can, in principle, be checked by re-machining a sample and re-running the test rig; a disputed clinical-trial outcome in a now-treated or deceased patient population usually cannot be re-run at all. This single fact reshapes the entire evidentiary standard.

    Three structural differences follow from it:

    • Physical re-testability. Engineering claims about materials, structures, and components can often be independently re-verified against the original artefact, lab notebook, or calibration log — a forensic route rarely available in human-subjects research.
    • Professional licensure exposure. Many engineering academics also hold a Professional Engineer (PE) or Chartered Engineer licence. A misconduct finding can trigger parallel discipline from a state or national licensing board — a structural check with no direct academic equivalent for most non-clinician biomedical researchers.
    • Public-safety framing. The National Society of Professional Engineers’ Code of Ethics states that engineers “shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” as its first fundamental canon. Biomedical research ethics is instead anchored in the Belmont Report’s principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice — a subject-protection frame rather than an infrastructure-safety frame.

    Prevalence data reflects the same underlying pattern. A widely cited 2009 meta-analysis (Fanelli, published via PLOS ONE) found that close to 2% of scientists admitted to fabricating or falsifying data at least once, with up to a third admitting other questionable research practices — figures drawn predominantly from biomedical and life-science samples. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Science and Engineering Ethics (Xie et al.) updated pooled prevalence estimates for both research misconduct and questionable research practices, underlining that engineering-specific base rates remain comparatively under-studied against biomedicine’s much larger evidence base.

    Types of Misconduct Most Relevant to Engineering Research

    The core FFP taxonomy applies across disciplines, but its practical expression in engineering research differs from its expression in biomedicine.

    Misconduct type Typical biomedical expression Typical engineering expression
    Fabrication Invented clinical outcomes, patient counts, or assay readings Invented structural-test results, fatigue-cycle counts, or simulation outputs
    Falsification Selective omission of adverse trial data; altered statistical models Altered materials-strength certificates; suppressed failed load tests
    Image manipulation Reused or altered western blots, microscopy, or gel images Altered micrographs, stress-map renders, or non-destructive-test scans
    Plagiarism Copied text, methods, or literature review sections Copied methodology or design specifications without attribution

    Image manipulation as research misconduct deserves particular attention: COPE guidance treats any enhancing, obscuring, moving, or adding of image features as misconduct, while proportionate brightness/contrast adjustments applied equally across an image (and its controls) remain acceptable. In engineering, the equivalent images are typically micrographs, non-destructive-testing scans, or stress-distribution renders — evidence that, unlike a clinical image, can sometimes be regenerated from the original physical specimen if it still exists.

    Structural-Testing and Materials-Data Fraud: Four Real Cases

    Research misconduct case studies in engineering rarely make front-page news the way clinical-trial scandals do, but several documented cases illustrate the pattern.

    • Kobe Steel (2017). The Japanese manufacturer admitted to falsifying quality-inspection data on the strength and durability of aluminium, copper, and steel products, which had been supplied into automotive, rail, and aerospace supply chains — a case that, while industrial rather than academic, shows how falsified materials data propagates once it enters downstream engineering use.
    • Ranga Dias superconductivity claims. A University of Rochester investigation concluded that physicist Ranga Dias had committed research misconduct, including data fabrication and falsification, in connection with room-temperature superconductivity claims published in Nature. Multiple papers were retracted and Dias was dismissed — a rare case where fabricated materials-property data was caught partly through failed independent replication attempts by other labs.
    • Falsified precast-concrete inspection records. A case reported through American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) channels involved a materials-testing firm supplying falsified paperwork claiming that required inspections of precast concrete units had been carried out when they had not — misconduct that, had it gone undetected, would have compromised a live construction project rather than merely a journal record.
    • Forged structural engineering seals. Separately reported cases have involved individuals using stolen or copied software to forge a licensed engineer’s professional seal on structural plans, bypassing the licensure check that engineering — uniquely among the research disciplines discussed here — relies on as a second line of defence beyond peer review.

    The common thread: in three of the four cases, the fraud was exposed through re-inspection of a physical artefact — steel stock, a concrete unit, a stamped drawing — rather than statistical anomaly detection alone.

    Common Questions and What Comes Next

    What are the types of research misconduct?

    The three recognised types are fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating data, equipment, or processes to misrepresent findings), and plagiarism (using others’ work without attribution). Related but distinct issues — undisclosed conflicts of interest, authorship disputes, and citation manipulation — are handled under separate publication-ethics procedures rather than the core misconduct definition.

    What is the difference between fabrication and falsification?

    Fabrication means inventing data or results that were never actually produced by an experiment or test. Falsification means manipulating real research materials, equipment, or processes, or altering/omitting genuine data, so that the record no longer accurately reflects what happened. Both are treated as equally serious under the ORI’s FFP standard.

    Is image manipulation considered research misconduct?

    Yes — inappropriate image manipulation is treated as a form of falsification under COPE guidance. Enhancing, removing, moving, or adding specific image features is prohibited; uniform brightness or contrast adjustments applied equally to an image and its controls are acceptable, provided nothing is obscured or misrepresented.

    What is an example of research misconduct in engineering?

    Documented examples include the Kobe Steel falsified materials-certification scandal, the Ranga Dias room-temperature superconductivity fabrication finding at the University of Rochester, and falsified precast-concrete inspection paperwork reported through ASCE channels. Each involved misrepresenting physical-material or structural-test data rather than clinical or behavioural data.

    For research administrators, the implication is practical: engineering integrity offices should maintain re-testing and sample-retention protocols alongside the statistical and plagiarism-detection tools built for biomedical and social-science misconduct. A materials sample or calibration log retained past publication is often the single most decisive piece of evidence in resolving an engineering allegation — a resource with no direct biomedical equivalent once a clinical study has closed. As more engineering journals adopt COPE’s flowcharts and licensing boards sharpen data-retention expectations, expect engineering cases to be resolved increasingly through re-testable physical evidence rather than statistical inference alone.

  • Duke Research Misconduct Policy vs MIT, Stanford

    Duke, MIT and Stanford each operationalise the same federal research-misconduct standard through different institutional machinery. Duke routes allegations to a Misconduct Review Officer and a 24-hour Integrity Line; MIT centralises review under its Vice President for Research; Stanford assigns first-line assessment to school deans under a Research Policy Handbook chapter revised effective 1 January 2026. All three exist to satisfy one governing rule: the Public Health Service Policy on Research Misconduct.

    The federal policy on research misconduct — codified at 42 C.F.R. Part 93 and enforced by the HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — defines research misconduct as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. Every US university that accepts Public Health Service funding, including Duke, MIT and Stanford, must maintain an institutional policy that meets this baseline, then layers its own governance, reporting channels, and disciplinary structure on top.

    How does Duke’s research misconduct policy define and handle allegations?

    Duke’s research misconduct policy is set out in the Duke University Policy and Procedures Governing Misconduct in Research, part of the Faculty Handbook and last updated in May 2023. Allegations are directed to a designated Misconduct Review Officer (MRO), or to a department chair, division chief, or dean, who must promptly forward the matter to the MRO.

    Duke also operates an Integrity Line — a 24-hour, anonymous telephone hotline (1-800-826-8109) — so that reporters can raise concerns without disclosing their identity. This dual-channel design (a named institutional officer plus an anonymous hotline) reflects a broader reform effort: Duke’s policy was revised to extend coverage beyond faculty to research staff, alongside wider research-integrity reforms following a 2019 case in which the university agreed to a $112.5 million False Claims Act settlement over fabricated data in federally funded pulmonary research, as reported by Science. That episode is a documented driver of the university folding staff explicitly into the policy’s scope, according to case-study materials prepared for the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR).

    How does MIT structure its research misconduct procedures?

    MIT’s framework sits in MIT Policies and Procedures §10.1, “Procedures for Dealing with Misconduct in Research and Scholarship,” last updated 10 December 2025. Oversight is centralised: every allegation, wherever it is first raised, must be conveyed promptly to the Vice President for Research (VPR), MIT’s designated Research Integrity Officer.

    MIT’s definition tracks the federal FFP triad — fabrication (making up data), falsification (manipulating materials or altering results), and plagiarism (appropriating another’s ideas or words without credit) — but adds a fourth category not found in the core PHS definition: deliberate interference, meaning intentionally causing material harm to another’s research, such as damaging equipment or deleting data. MIT’s policy also explicitly excludes self-plagiarism (text recycling) and authorship or credit disputes among former collaborators from the definition of misconduct, mirroring longstanding ORI guidance on plagiarism.

    What changed in Stanford’s research misconduct policy for 2026?

    Stanford’s governing chapter, Research Policy Handbook (RPH) 1.7, “Research Misconduct: Policy on Allegations, Investigations, and Reporting,” dates originally to 3 February 1983 but carries a current version effective 1 January 2026. The update aligns Stanford’s procedures with the 2024 Final Rule amending 42 C.F.R. Part 93 — the same federal regulation that governs Duke and MIT.

    Two provisions distinguish Stanford’s approach. First, the “Six-Year Rule” (42 C.F.R. §93.104): research misconduct allegations are only actionable if the conduct occurred within six years of the date Stanford or a federal agency received the allegation, subject to a “subsequent use” exception (if the respondent later cited or republished the disputed material) and a “public health and safety” exception. Second, first-line responsibility sits with the school dean, who must assess an allegation and, if it meets the definition, immediately open an inquiry and notify the Dean of Research — a more devolved structure than MIT’s single VPR intake point.

    How do Duke, MIT and Stanford compare side by side?

    The table below sets the three institutional policies against each other and against the federal baseline they all must satisfy.

    Institution Governing document First-line authority Reporting channel Misconduct definition
    Duke University Policy and Procedures Governing Misconduct in Research (Faculty Handbook, updated May 2023) Misconduct Review Officer MRO, department chair/dean, or anonymous Integrity Line FFP, per 42 C.F.R. Part 93; covers faculty and staff
    MIT MIT Policies and Procedures §10.1 (updated 10 Dec 2025) Vice President for Research Report to VPR, typically via supervisor or department head FFP plus deliberate interference; excludes self-plagiarism and authorship disputes
    Stanford University Research Policy Handbook 1.7 (current version 1 Jan 2026; original 1983) School dean, then Dean of Research Report to school dean for initial assessment FFP per 42 C.F.R. Part 93 (2024 Final Rule); six-year time limitation
    Federal baseline PHS Policy on Research Misconduct, 42 C.F.R. Part 93 HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) Institutional report to ORI after a finding Fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP)

    All three institutions converge on the same two-stage process required by federal policy:

    • An inquiry — a preliminary assessment of whether an allegation has substance and warrants formal review.
    • An investigation — a full evidentiary examination that produces findings reported to ORI when federal funding is involved.

    Common questions on federal and institutional research misconduct policy

    What is the US federal research misconduct policy?

    The US federal research misconduct policy is the Public Health Service Policy on Research Misconduct, codified at 42 C.F.R. Part 93 and enforced by ORI. It applies to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in proposing, performing, reviewing, or reporting PHS-supported research, and requires every recipient institution to maintain a compliant local policy.

    What is 42 CFR Part 93 research misconduct?

    42 C.F.R. Part 93 is the federal regulation setting the definitions, procedural standards, and reporting obligations that PHS-funded institutions — including Duke, MIT, and Stanford — must follow. A 2024 Final Rule to Part 93 took effect on 1 January 2026, updating provisions including the definition of plagiarism that institutions must now apply.

    What are the three types of research misconduct?

    The three federally recognised types are fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating materials, equipment, or data so the research record is inaccurate), and plagiarism (using another’s ideas, processes, or words without credit). Honest error and legitimate differences of scientific opinion are explicitly excluded.

    What constitutes research misconduct according to federal regulations?

    A federal finding requires three elements together: a significant departure from accepted research practices, conduct committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, and an allegation proven by a preponderance of the evidence. All three tests must be met before ORI or an institution can record a formal finding of misconduct.

    What this means for research administrators

    For research administrators, compliance officers, and institutional leaders, the practical lesson is that federal alignment does not mean procedural uniformity. Duke, MIT, and Stanford each satisfy 42 C.F.R. Part 93, yet route allegations through different first-line authorities — an MRO, a VPR, and a school dean respectively — and set different scope boundaries around staff coverage, deliberate interference, and time limitations. Institutions benchmarking their own research administration policy against peer practice should treat the federal rule as the floor, not the template, and expect further local revisions as the 2024 Final Rule to Part 93 continues to work through university policy cycles into 2026 and beyond.

    Given that Stanford’s update took effect only this year and MIT revised its procedures in December 2025, institutional research misconduct policies are clearly still catching up to the federal 2024 Final Rule — administrators reviewing their own institution’s policy should confirm which version of 42 C.F.R. Part 93 it currently cites before assuming compliance.

  • Elsevier’s Research Integrity Screening Process

    Elsevier screens research submissions for integrity issues through a layered pipeline: automated tools such as Check Integrity and Crossref Similarity Check flag plagiarism, duplicate submissions and image anomalies at intake, specialist Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics (RIPE) analysts investigate confirmed concerns, and outcomes range from correction through expression of concern to full retraction, following guidelines set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

    Research integrity screening is the set of technical checks and human review stages a publisher applies to a manuscript, before and after publication, to detect fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, undisclosed image manipulation and paper-mill activity. At Elsevier, that pipeline runs continuously from the moment a manuscript is submitted to the point, if necessary, of retraction.

    How Elsevier’s research-integrity pipeline works, from submission to retraction

    Elsevier operates one of the largest editorial screening operations in scholarly publishing. In 2025, the publisher received 4.2 million manuscript submissions across roughly 3,000 journals and published 795,000 after validation and peer review, according to Elsevier’s own account of its editorial process. Elsevier states that its published output accounts for over 18% of global research output and 29% of citations — a scale that shapes why it has invested heavily in both automated screening and dedicated integrity staff rather than relying on peer review alone.

    The pipeline runs across four broad stages, each with a different primary tool or team responsible for catching a different class of problem.

    Stage Primary tool or team Typical trigger
    Submission intake Check Integrity screening tool; Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) Text overlap, duplicate manuscript, unauthorised authorship change
    Peer review Editors, external reviewers, RIPE analysts Implausible data, reviewer-flagged inconsistency, suspicious image reuse
    Post-publication monitoring Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics (RIPE) team Reader or whistleblower reports, cross-journal pattern analysis
    Enforcement Editors-in-chief, following COPE-guided process Confirmed fabrication, falsification or plagiarism

    What does Elsevier screen for at the point of submission?

    Every manuscript submitted to an Elsevier journal is routed through automated checks before an editor sees it. Check Integrity, Elsevier’s proprietary screening tool, had been expanded across more than 2,000 journals as of March 2026, according to trade press coverage in Research Information. The tool automatically reviews submissions for red flags — including unauthorised authorship changes, undisclosed conflicts of interest and signs of duplicate or template-like submission — and routes anything flagged to specialist integrity analysts, freeing editors to focus on scientific merit.

    Plagiarism screening runs in parallel through Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate, which compares submitted text against a large index of published articles and web content. There is no fixed similarity percentage that automatically triggers rejection; editors interpret each report to distinguish appropriate citation from genuine textual misconduct.

    Paper-mill detection layers on top of these checks. Integrity analysts look for patterns that recur across industrialised fraud, including:

    • Formulaic, template-like titles or methods sections
    • Unusual or inconsistent author affiliations and contact details
    • Data or experimental descriptions that do not match the stated methodology
    • Systematic image reuse across ostensibly unrelated papers
    • Irregular peer-review patterns, such as reviewer suggestions tied to the same small pool of contacts

    How does Elsevier detect image manipulation and data-integrity problems?

    Image screening combines editorial guidelines with a mix of manual and software-assisted checks. Elsevier’s policy permits minor adjustments to brightness, contrast or colour balance only where they do not obscure or eliminate information present in the original image; the use of generative AI to create or alter a figure is prohibited outright. Where manipulation is suspected, editors can apply forensic image-analysis tools of the kind recommended by the US Office of Research Integrity, and will typically request the original, unprocessed image files directly from the authors.

    Elsevier has also published on the scale of automated flagging behind these checks. At the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity in 2024, Elsevier data scientist Yuri Kashnitsky presented on large-scale flagging of integrity misconduct across the publisher’s portfolio, noting that all system-generated findings are manually checked and confirmed by investigators before any corrective action is suggested to editors — underscoring that software narrows the search space, but a human analyst still makes the determination.

    Who investigates confirmed misconduct, and what enforcement follows?

    Once a concern is substantiated, Elsevier’s in-house Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics (RIPE) team leads the investigation, working with journal editors and, where warranted, the authors’ institutions. Elsevier states that it follows retraction guidelines developed by COPE, and confirmed problems resolve into one of three outcomes: a correction or erratum for errors that do not undermine the paper’s conclusions, an expression of concern where the investigation is inconclusive but doubts remain, or a retraction where the findings are no longer considered reliable.

    A recent case shows this enforcement ladder operating at scale. In a statement updated in May 2026, Elsevier disclosed that a comprehensive, multi-year audit of the journal Heliyon — using Check Integrity screening combined with manual review by RIPE analysts — had produced approximately 1,100 corrections to the scientific record, affecting around 3% of everything the journal had published across 12 years. Those 1,100 actions spanned corrections, expressions of concern and retractions; impacted authors were notified and given the chance to respond before editors made a final determination. Following the audit, Web of Science removed an indexing hold it had placed on Heliyon, and Elsevier said it was applying lessons from the case to workflows across its wider journal portfolio.

    Common questions about Elsevier’s integrity screening

    Does Elsevier use iThenticate for plagiarism screening?

    Yes. Elsevier’s journals route submitted manuscripts through Crossref Similarity Check, which is powered by iThenticate, comparing text against a large index of published articles and web content. Editors, not the software alone, judge whether flagged overlap reflects proper citation or genuine plagiarism before any editorial decision is made.

    Who investigates allegations of research misconduct at Elsevier?

    Elsevier’s in-house Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics (RIPE) team investigates confirmed concerns, working alongside journal editors and, where relevant, the authors’ institutions. Investigations follow COPE guidelines and typically involve requesting raw underlying data before any corrective action is taken.

    What is considered the most serious form of research misconduct?

    Fabrication and falsification of data are generally treated as the most serious forms of misconduct, alongside plagiarism, because they directly corrupt the reliability of the published record. Elsevier’s policies place these above lesser breaches such as citation gaming or unresolved authorship disputes.

    What happens after a research-integrity investigation confirms a problem?

    Confirmed issues lead to one of three outcomes: a correction for errors that do not undermine the findings, an expression of concern where evidence is inconclusive, or a retraction where the results are no longer considered reliable. All three are published and linked to the original article, per COPE guidance.

    What this means for institutions, authors and integrity offices

    For research administrators, the Heliyon case is a reminder that publisher-side screening is a complement to institutional processes, not a substitute for them. When a journal’s RIPE team contacts an institution about a flagged submission or published paper, that request typically triggers — and depends on — the institution’s own research-integrity office and record-keeping, an area covered in more detail in CASRAI’s research administration resources and its wider research-integrity dictionary entries. Authors, in turn, should expect to be asked for raw, unprocessed data or images at any stage, including years after publication, and should retain those records accordingly.

    Elsevier is not acting alone: it collaborates with other publishers through the STM Integrity Hub to detect duplicate submissions across the wider industry, reflecting a broader shift toward cross-publisher, not just single-journal, integrity infrastructure. As automated screening tools mature, the balance is likely to keep shifting toward earlier detection at submission — but the Heliyon audit shows that human RIPE analysts, not algorithms, remain the ones who make the final call on correction, expression of concern or retraction.

  • ACM Open Access vs Plan S: 2026 Compliance Check

    ACM open access is now the default, not an option: since 1 January 2026 the Association for Computing Machinery publishes all journals, conference proceedings and magazines under a fully open-access model, replacing its previous hybrid Read & Publish arrangement. Under the CC BY licence, zero-embargo release and author-retained copyright that now apply across the ACM Digital Library, the model satisfies cOAlition S’s Plan S licensing, immediacy and rights-retention requirements — closing a compliance gap that existed while ACM operated as a transformative agreement.

    ACM Open is the Read & Publish framework through which participating institutions pay a fixed annual fee, based on their average publishing output over the previous three years, in exchange for unlimited open-access publishing by their corresponding authors and full institutional read access to the ACM Digital Library.

    What is ACM open access?

    As of 1 January 2026, ACM transitioned every journal, magazine and conference proceeding in the ACM Digital Library to full open access, removing the mixed subscription/hybrid model that had applied since the ACM Open programme launched in 2020. The ACM Digital Library itself was split into two tiers on the same date: a free Basic edition giving open access to ACM’s full published corpus, and a paid Premium edition adding discovery tools, usage metrics, citation management and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature.

    Institutional participation still runs through ACM Open, ACM’s Read & Publish framework. Corresponding authors at a subscribing institution publish an unlimited number of open-access articles without paying an article processing charge (APC) directly; the institution instead pays one fixed annual fee tied to its historical publishing volume. Authors at non-participating institutions can still publish open access but may be liable for an APC.

    What does Plan S actually require?

    Plan S is the funder-driven open-access mandate coordinated by cOAlition S, a consortium of national and charitable research funders including UKRI, Wellcome and members of the European Research Council network. It sets three non-negotiable conditions for compliant publication, in force since the policy’s 2021 implementation date:

    • Licensing — the published article must carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or an equivalent that permits free reuse, as a default condition.
    • Immediacy — there can be no embargo period; the Version of Record, or an accepted manuscript carrying the same licence, must be open at the moment of publication.
    • Rights retention — authors, not publishers, must retain the rights needed to comply, formalised in cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript regardless of the publisher’s own copyright terms.

    cOAlition S also phased out support for hybrid and transformative-journal routes: funding for APCs in hybrid subscription journals was withdrawn after 2024, meaning publishers relying on transformative agreements needed to complete a full flip to open access to remain straightforwardly fundable under Plan S.

    Does ACM Open satisfy cOAlition S requirements?

    Measured against each Plan S condition, ACM’s current model clears the bar directly rather than through a transitional workaround. The table below maps ACM’s terms to the three cOAlition S requirements.

    Plan S requirement ACM Open / ACM Digital Library position
    CC BY licence by default CC BY is the default licence under ACM Open; authors may select an alternative Creative Commons licence such as CC BY-NC-ND where a funder permits it.
    No embargo (immediacy) Zero embargo — the Version of Record is openly accessible in the ACM Digital Library at the point of publication for every ACM title.
    Author/institution rights retention ACM ceased requiring copyright transfer from authors; authors grant ACM a non-exclusive licence to publish rather than assigning copyright, satisfying the Rights Retention Strategy.
    Sustainable, transparent cost model ACM Open’s Read & Publish fee is fixed for the agreement term and based on three-year historical output, giving institutions a predictable APC-equivalent cost.

    The practical effect for a cOAlition S-funded computer scientist is that publishing in an ACM venue no longer requires checking whether a specific journal is “transformative” or tracking an embargo clock — the open-access, CC BY, zero-embargo position now applies uniformly across the ACM catalogue.

    What happened to ACM’s transformative agreements?

    Before the January 2026 flip, ACM Open operated as a transformative agreement: a Read & Publish deal under which subscription revenue was gradually redirected toward open-access publishing, with the expectation that the journal portfolio would eventually convert fully to open access. UK higher-education institutions negotiated ACM Open terms through Jisc, whose subscriptions catalogue still lists the prior “ACM OPEN Journals 2023-2025” agreement as the precursor arrangement that libraries used to budget for the transition.

    ACM’s own SIGGRAPH leadership signalled the scale of this shift well in advance: in a June 2024 community Q&A, ACM SIGGRAPH chair Jonathan Aldrich stated that ACM anticipated 60-65% or more of authors would already be covered by institutional open-access agreements by the time of the full transition, with the remainder needing an author-paid or waiver route. That anticipated coverage gap is precisely what the January 2026 full flip was designed to close, since every article — not just those from ACM Open institutions — is now open access regardless of the author’s institutional agreement status.

    What this means for institutions and researchers

    For research administrators tracking funder compliance, ACM’s flip removes a recurring due-diligence step: computer-science output published with ACM no longer needs an individual title-by-title check against a cOAlition S-approved transformative journal list, because the requirement is now met at the publisher level. Institutions still weighing whether to join ACM Open should note that the Read & Publish fee is separate from open-access compliance itself — declining to subscribe does not make an ACM article closed, but it may shift APC liability onto individual authors or their grants.

    For authors publishing under UKRI, Horizon Europe or other cOAlition S-aligned funder mandates, the practical takeaway is that ACM venues can now be selected on scholarly merit without a separate compliance audit — a meaningful simplification for research administrators supporting authors across computing, information systems and related interdisciplinary fields.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is ACM open access?

    ACM open access refers to ACM’s publishing model, under which, as of January 2026, all ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines are freely accessible with no reader-side subscription barrier. Authors retain copyright and publish under a CC BY licence by default, typically funded through their institution’s ACM Open Read & Publish agreement rather than a per-article fee.

    Is ACM open access free for readers?

    Yes. The ACM Digital Library’s Basic edition gives free, open-access reading of ACM’s full published corpus. A separate paid Premium edition exists, but it adds discovery and analytics tools rather than gating access to the research articles themselves.

    Does ACM’s open-access model satisfy Plan S?

    Yes. ACM’s default CC BY licence, zero-embargo release of the Version of Record, and author rights retention policy together meet all three of cOAlition S’s core Plan S conditions, without relying on a transformative-agreement exception.

    What licence does ACM Open use?

    ACM Open’s default licence is CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution), which permits free reuse with attribution and satisfies cOAlition S’s licensing requirement. Authors may request an alternative Creative Commons licence, such as CC BY-NC-ND, where their funder’s terms allow it.

    Looking ahead

    ACM’s move puts one of computing’s two dominant scholarly publishers — alongside IEEE, which retains a hybrid subscription model for most titles — fully inside the Plan S compliance perimeter without caveats. For funders and institutions monitoring discipline-specific open-access uptake, ACM’s flip is a useful signal that field-specific societies can complete a full transition to open access while keeping a Read & Publish fee structure recognisable to library budgets. Research administrators supporting computer-science authors should update internal compliance checklists to reflect that ACM no longer requires case-by-case verification against transformative-journal criteria.

  • Plan S Wikipedia vs cOAlition S: What Changed

    Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of research funders. Wikipedia’s article on Plan S is broadly accurate on the initiative’s origins and ten principles, but its most-cited figures on transformative agreements, rights-retention uptake, and coalition membership are frozen between 2021 and 2023 — and the article makes no mention of cOAlition S’s own Strategy for 2026-2030, published in November 2025.

    Plan S is the requirement, backed by cOAlition S funders, that peer-reviewed research they fund be made immediately and freely available in a compliant open-access journal, platform, or repository, without embargo, under an open licence.

    What does Wikipedia say about Plan S?

    Wikipedia’s “Plan S” article opens by describing the initiative as a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries, requiring that publicly funded research be published in open repositories or fully open-access journals by 2021. It correctly identifies cOAlition S as the coordinating body and lists the ten founding principles set out in the original implementation guidance.

    The article also notes real, later developments: the extension of the compliance deadline from 2020 to 2021, the Rights Retention Strategy, an October 2023 proposal to explore publishing models without author-facing fees (“diamond” open access), and a 2024 Gates Foundation policy shift described as not fully aligned with Plan S. This shows the page is edited, not abandoned — but the edits are sparse and several core figures have not been touched in years.

    Where the Wikipedia article holds up

    Several elements of Wikipedia’s account remain a fair summary of Plan S as it was designed. The ten principles — author copyright retention, standardised and capped publication fees, funder-level monitoring of compliance, and the explicit statement that hybrid open-access journals do not satisfy the key principle — match the original guidance released by the Science Europe-coordinated task force on 27 November 2018.

    The licensing detail is also accurate: compliant articles must carry a CC BY 4.0 licence, or alternatively CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC0, and journals must meet baseline peer-review standards consistent with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). None of this has changed, and Wikipedia states it correctly.

    Where the record is stale

    The gaps are concentrated in exactly the areas that move fastest: funding mechanics, uptake statistics, and coalition scope. The table below sets Wikipedia’s wording against cOAlition S’s own published record.

    Wikipedia’s claim Current cOAlition S position Source
    Transformative agreement contracts “may not last beyond 2023” cOAlition S confirmed in January 2023 that member funding for transformative arrangements would continue but cease entirely on 31 December 2024, with no new agreements accepted after 30 June 2023 cOAlition S, “cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024”
    Rights Retention Strategy uptake given “as of October 2021 … over 500 works” No comparable running total has been added since; the Strategy remains active guidance with no current uptake figure cited on the page cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy guidance (ongoing)
    Lede describes cOAlition S as funders “from twelve European countries” Membership and policy alignment now extends beyond that founding European core, as the article’s own later reference to the Gates Foundation’s 2024 policy shift illustrates cOAlition S member list; Wikipedia “Plan S” article, “Policy changes by member organizations” section
    No mention of a forward strategy beyond 2023-24 developments cOAlition S published its Strategy for 2026-2030 in November 2025, setting three strategic priorities across two implementation phases cOAlition S, “cOAlition S Strategy for 2026-2030”

    None of this makes the Wikipedia article wrong about what Plan S was. It makes the article an increasingly incomplete guide to what Plan S is now — a distinction that matters for anyone citing it in a policy brief, grant compliance note, or institutional guidance document.

    What cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy adds

    cOAlition S’s Strategy for 2026-2030, published in November 2025, is the most authoritative recent statement of where the coalition is heading, and it is entirely absent from Wikipedia’s coverage. The strategy sets three strategic priorities: reinforcing the foundations for full, immediate, and equitable open access to peer-reviewed articles; supporting the digital infrastructure that underpins open access; and exploring financially sustainable and equitable publishing models while tracking their outcomes.

    Implementation runs in two phases. Phase one (2026-2027) concentrates on foundational work, digital infrastructure, and member services. Phase two (2028-2030) is intended to deepen work on sustainability and equity, subject to review of phase-one outcomes by the Leaders Group. This phased structure directly supersedes the transitional, 2018-2023 “transformative agreement” framing that still anchors Wikipedia’s implementation section.

    • Three strategic priorities replace the earlier single-minded focus on the 2021 compliance deadline.
    • A defined two-phase timetable (2026-2027, then 2028-2030) gives institutions a planning horizon Wikipedia’s article does not mention.
    • Financial support for transformative arrangements ended on 31 December 2024, closing a funding route Wikipedia still frames as open until “2023”.

    Common questions

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S requires that peer-reviewed publications resulting from research funded by cOAlition S members be made immediately open access on publication, with no embargo, under an open licence such as CC BY 4.0. Authors must retain copyright. The requirement applied to grants awarded from 1 January 2021 onward.

    What are the five pillars of Wikipedia?

    Wikipedia operates on five pillars: it functions as an encyclopedia, is written from a neutral point of view, offers free content anyone can use or edit, expects civility among editors, and has no firm rules. Those norms explain why fast-moving funder guidance, like Plan S’s, can lag behind primary sources between volunteer edits.

    What this means for institutions and publishers

    Research administrators, library staff, and publishers who cite Wikipedia’s Plan S article as a compliance reference should treat it as a starting point, not a current-state document. Anyone advising on plan s open access obligations should verify funding-route and deadline details directly against cOAlition S’s guidance pages before applying them to a grant, agreement, or institutional policy — particularly anything touching transformative agreements, which stopped receiving cOAlition S funding at the end of 2024, not 2023.

    This pattern is not unique to Plan S. Fast-moving standards and funder mandates routinely outrun general-reference encyclopedia coverage, which depends on volunteer editors noticing and sourcing each change. The practical fix is straightforward: use Wikipedia to orient, then confirm operative dates, funding rules, and current strategic priorities against the originating body’s own published guidance.

    For related standards and terminology used across research administration, see CASRAI’s open research dictionary and the research administration pillar.

  • PMC Open Access Subset vs Plan S: Not the Same

    The PMC Open Access Subset and Plan S are not the same thing. The PMC Open Access Subset is a licensing classification inside PubMed Central (PMC) that flags which archived articles carry reuse-permitting licences for text mining and redistribution. Plan S is a funder mandate from cOAlition S that requires immediate open access publication of funded research. One is a repository filter; the other is a compliance requirement — and confusing them leads authors to think a PMC listing satisfies a funder’s open access policy when it may not.

    The PMC Open Access Subset is the portion of PubMed Central’s full-text archive made available under Creative Commons or similar licences that permit reuse beyond reading, including text mining and redistribution. This distinction — repository versus mandate — is the source of a persistent mix-up among authors preparing to comply with funder open access requirements.

    What Is the PMC Open Access Subset?

    The PMC Open Access Subset is maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It contains articles and preprints made available under machine-readable licences — Creative Commons or similar — that permit reuse beyond simple reading access.

    NLM groups the subset into three licence tiers:

    • Commercial Use Allowed — CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND licences
    • Non-Commercial Use Only — CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND licences
    • Other — no machine-readable licence, no licence, or a custom licence, with restricted redistribution on the PMC Cloud Service

    As of the NIH’s most recent update, the subset spans well over 3.4 million journal articles and preprints, retrievable via the PMC FTP Service, Cloud Service, OAI-PMH Service, or BioC API. Not every article in PMC belongs to the Open Access Subset — many PMC-hosted articles remain under standard copyright and are excluded from bulk text-mining retrieval.

    This is a critical, frequently missed distinction: PMC itself (the archive) and the NIH Public Access Policy (which mandates deposit of NIH-funded manuscripts into PMC) are separate from the Open Access Subset (the licensing classification). An article can be freely readable in PMC under the Public Access Policy while still sitting outside the Open Access Subset, because it lacks a reuse-permitting licence.

    What Is Plan S?

    Plan S is a funder-driven open access initiative launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a coalition of national and international research funders including UKRI, Wellcome, and members of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme. It requires that peer-reviewed publications arising from funded research be made immediately and fully open access, with no embargo period.

    Under Plan S principles, compliant publication routes include:

    • Publishing in a fully open access journal or platform
    • Publishing in a subscription journal while depositing the accepted manuscript in an open access repository immediately on publication (the “Rights Retention Strategy”)
    • Publishing on an open access platform or in a repository that meets cOAlition S technical requirements

    cOAlition S states that authors or their institutions should retain copyright, and that a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence is the preferred licence type. Compliance is assessed against funder-specific policy terms, not against any single repository’s inclusion criteria.

    PMC Open Access Subset vs Plan S: Key Differences

    The clearest way to separate these two is by function: a repository classification versus a funder policy. The table below sets this alongside a third commonly conflated mechanism — the United States’ federal public access requirement — since UK and international researchers frequently encounter all three in the same compliance conversation.

    Feature PMC Open Access Subset Plan S US federal public access mandate
    Nature Repository licensing classification Funder policy mandate Federal agency policy (via OSTP)
    Governing body National Library of Medicine (NIH) cOAlition S funders Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
    What it governs Reuse rights of archived articles Where/how funded research is published Timing of public access to federally funded research
    Embargo position Not applicable — licence-based, not time-based Zero embargo required from 2021 Zero embargo required by 31 December 2025 (OSTP’s 2022 Nelson Memo)
    Geographic scope Global archive, US-hosted Primarily European and international funders United States federal agencies
    Enforcement mechanism None — it is a content filter, not a compliance check Funder grant conditions Agency public access plans

    The overlap that causes confusion: research funded under Plan S can end up in the PMC Open Access Subset if it carries a qualifying licence, but Plan S compliance is judged by the funder against its own policy terms, not by whether NLM has classified the article into the subset.

    Does Plan S Compliance Require the PMC Open Access Subset?

    No. Plan S does not name the PMC Open Access Subset as a compliance route. cOAlition S funders accept publication in a compliant journal, an institutional or subject repository meeting technical requirements, or immediate deposit of the accepted manuscript under an approved licence. PMC is one possible repository destination for biomedical research, but Plan S compliance is assessed by licence terms and embargo length, not by NLM’s internal subset classification.

    Authors publishing biomedical research funded by a cOAlition S member should check the funder’s own open access policy and, separately, confirm whether their institution or publisher will additionally deposit the manuscript into PMC. These are two distinct actions that happen to intersect for US-relevant biomedical literature, not one unified process.

    Common Questions

    What is PMC open access?

    PMC open access refers to the PMC Open Access Subset, the portion of PubMed Central archived under licences — typically Creative Commons — that permit reuse, including text mining and redistribution. It is not a funder policy; it is a licensing classification applied to specific articles already deposited in PMC.

    Are PMC and PubMed the same?

    No. PubMed is a database of citations and abstracts, while PMC (PubMed Central) is a full-text archive of biomedical journal articles. Both are maintained by the National Library of Medicine, but PubMed indexes metadata, whereas PMC stores the complete article text, of which only a subset carries reuse licences.

    Is PMC free to use?

    Yes, reading PMC articles is free. However, reuse rights differ by article: NLM states that PMC provides long-term preservation and free reading access, but text mining or redistribution beyond fair use requires the article to carry a qualifying licence within the Open Access Subset — free-to-read is not the same as free-to-reuse.

    Implications for Authors and Institutions

    For authors, the practical takeaway is definitive: satisfying a funder’s Plan S obligation and appearing in the PMC Open Access Subset are two separate compliance checks. Meeting one does not automatically satisfy the other. Institutional research administration teams tracking funder compliance should verify licence type, embargo length, and deposit location independently for each requirement, rather than treating “it’s in PMC” as proof of open access mandate compliance.

    For publishers and repository managers, the distinction matters for metadata accuracy: an article’s PMC Open Access Subset licence tag should be checked and communicated separately from any funder compliance statement attached to the same article.

    Looking ahead, the gap between these mechanisms is narrowing. The US federal government’s move toward zero-embargo public access by the end of 2025, alongside Plan S’s established zero-embargo requirement since 2021, signals convergence on immediate access as the global norm — even though the underlying legal and technical mechanisms (funder mandate versus repository licence versus agency policy) remain distinct and will continue to require separate verification.