Preventing and addressing research misconduct demands more than imploring scientists to do better. It is also essential to address the structural issues that allow misconduct to flourish. With these structural factors in mind, this Special Issue explores the institutional obligations of journals and publishers, research institutions, funders, and the government to promote scientific integrity and advance trust in science. Articles from researchers affected by fraud, science “sleuths,” systematic reviewers, journal editors, academic officials, regulators, and leading experts on research integrity offer a range of ideas for responding to the research misconduct crisis, including increased transparency, stronger journal processes for review and retraction, improved scientific lab culture, and efforts to hold investigators prospectively accountable for scientific integrity, among several others.

The tenth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Gostin’s seminal treatise Global Health Law affords us the opportunity to reflect on his enduring legacy as a preeminent scholar, and one of the field’s founding thought leaders.

The field of global health law has evolved over the past decade to describe new legal and policy instruments that apply to a changing set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory norms that structure the global response to public health challenges. This special issue—bringing together the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law and the Global Health Law Consortium—examines the expansive evolution of the field of global health law and its continuing development to face new health threats.

I will describe how a fraudulent paper developed and offer insights into the institutional changes that are needed. I was a co-author on a paper described as a “clusterfake” due to at least two frauds allegedly occurring in the same paper. I will use my knowledge of behavioral ethics and my experience as a co-author on a fraudulent paper to explore changes that are needed to improve research integrity.

A tribute to Professor Larry Gostin for a special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics to mark the 10th anniversary of the launch of "Global Health Law".

I have been investigating and reporting on image manipulation in the bioscience literature since 2011. During this time, several new tools have emerged to streamline the processes of image analysis and reporting. When presenting and discussing examples of scientific image manipulation, a common question is “how do you find this stuff?” Herein, I outline common software and other utilities — a toolbox for discovery and reporting of problematic scientific images and other data. This may serve as a useful reference for those seeking to enhance the effective removal of problematic papers from the bioscience literature.

Retracted research publications reached an all-time high in 2023, and COVID-19 publications may have higher retraction rates than other publications. To better understand the impact of COVID-19 on the research literature, we analyzed 244 retracted publications related to COVID-19 in the PubMed database and the reasons for their retraction. Peer-review manipulation (18.4%) and error (20.9%) were the most common reasons for retraction, with time to retraction occurring far more quickly than in the past (13.2 mos, compared with 32.9 mos in a 2012 study). Publications focused on controversial topics were retracted rapidly (mean time to retraction 10.8 mos) but continued to receive media attention, suggesting that retraction alone may be insufficient to prevent the spread of scientific misinformation. More than half of the retractions resulted from problems that could have been detected prior to publication, including compromise of the peer review process, plagiarism, authorship issues, lack of ethics approvals, or journal errors, suggesting that more robust screening and peer review by journals can help to mitigate the recent rise in retractions.

The article examines the historical development of global health from its genesis in colonial-era tropical medicine, to the creation of the World Health Organization – formed to advance health rights for all. The authors call for continued reforms to the global health governance system to mitigate the enduring impact of colonialism.

Systematic reviewers are ideally placed to detect untrustworthy studies and decrease their use in decision making. The systematic review process already requires rigorous evaluation of an entire body of evidence related to a particular question. Excluding untrustworthy studies from systematic reviews can reduce their subsequent impact on evidence used for decisions and raise awareness of the problem among universities, journal editors, research funders and other stakeholders who can take appropriate action to eliminate them from the scientific literature.

Global health law has now emerged as an area of specialisation for students interested in global problems concerning health due largely, if not principally, to the inspiring lifelong scholarly work of Professor Lawrence Gostin. A growing number of universities in the world have established programs on global health law in which they address questions of equity and solidarity in addressing public health issues and emergencies, global and national preparedness for pandemics and other health related emergencies, international health regulations, and the intersection between health and human rights, to mention a few. We can expect that as global health threats and inequalities in access to health continue to rise, interest in global health law as a field of legal research and education will continue to grow.

The field of global health law encompasses both “hard” law treaties and “soft” law policies that shape global health norms. Transitioning from “international health law” to “global health law and policy,” global health policymakers have increasingly looked to soft law instruments to address public health needs in a rapidly globalizing world – within the World Health Organization and across global health governance. Yet, as policymakers have expanded the landscape of soft law policy instruments to advance global health across state and non-state actors, the COVID-19 response revealed the limitations of this soft law approach to global health threats, with states now seeking hard law reforms to strengthen global health governance. As hard and soft law can provide complementary approaches to preventing disease and promoting health, future research must conceptualize how these normative frameworks interact in advancing global health.

Journal editors often deal with allegations of research misconduct, defined by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the United States as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. It is important that editors have a transparent and consistent process to deal with these allegations quickly and fairly. This process will include the authors and may include research integrity officers at the sponsoring institution as well as funders. Retractions may not be consistent with the ORI definition, for example, specifying inadequate peer-review and unreported conflict of interest, but nevertheless represent scientific misconduct.

Communities and individuals globally continue to suffer the violent impacts of colonialism and racism, in a global system of governance that remains rooted in unequal and hierarchical power imbalances. The interpersonal, societal, and structural violence that persists around the world exists in violation of human rights, and is evidence of a persistent lack of political will to effectively invest in human rights, including the right to health, as a true priority.

The demand on States and non-State actors to fulfil the human right to health is imperative. Attacks on civilians during times of conflict and catastrophe, as seen in the latest escalation and display of imperial aggression by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory, demonstrate the consistent uneven application of human rights and commitment to fulfilling them.

Protecting human rights, and specifically the realization of the right to health, is fundamental as it has significant consequences for the realisation of other human rights. Eliminating discrimination requires paying sufficient attention to groups of individuals that suffer historical or persistent prejudice. Fulfilling a commitment to health equity and justice demands creating opportunity and conducive conditions for the dignity for all people.

Multi-institutional scientific research projects are increasingly common. Nevertheless, regulations and guidelines do not yet adequately address which entity should assume responsibility for research misconduct proceedings in multi-institutional research. This article explores the challenges of determining jurisdictional roles in research misconduct matters in collaborative science and proposes the application of a “jurisdictional interests test” as a framework for determining jurisdiction in multi-institutional research misconduct proceedings.

Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

Researchers involved in research misconduct proceedings are increasingly threatening or bringing legal defamation claims against the institutions, complainants, and publications involved in the proceedings. Although defamation claims do not often succeed, they can nevertheless be costly and lengthy. This article analyzes certain defamation cases in the research misconduct space and provides advice for institutions and other involved parties seeking to minimize potential defamation liability associated with research misconduct proceedings.

Our national scientific enterprise has a crisis of reproducibility. While this phenomenon has many contributors, one is the proliferation of data manipulation. Data manipulation may range from seemingly innocuous to brazen to the point of verging on criminal. This latter category has recently received more attention, stimulating a debate about the handling of such unpleasant matters. We co-authors have instigated and interacted with numerous research integrity investigations and believe the current model of handling potential violations of research integrity standards is deeply flawed. Institution-led investigations are fundamentally conflicted because of the potential for institutional reputational damage and financial harm from a finding of research misconduct. Concerns are often handled with secrecy, lethargy, and limited technical analysis. Integrity lapses are frequently handled with a lack of openness, accountability and proportional consequences, which have weakened public trust in the scientific enterprise.

We propose that research integrity violations of substantial scale should be independently investigated by appropriately resourced specialists. Such investigations should be completed within a time frame that facilitates meaningful corrective action when required or exoneration of the accused party when appropriate; completion of an investigation should rarely extend beyond one year and the results of the investigation should be made public.

Scientific advances to fight infectious diseases have been remarkable. International law and global governance have sought, and often failed, to keep pace, secure equity, and stop outbreaks. We trace the law and governance model emerging from early failure in the AIDS response and identify four elements: use of law by national governments to compel sharing; decentralized generic manufacturing; mechanisms for voluntary sharing of patents and technology transfer; international funding. In combination, these created a remarkable new ecosystem. We find that when COVID-19 hit and mRNA vaccines were rapidly developed, global North governments opposed mobilizing this synergistic model. Instead, equity efforts focused on financing purchase of vaccines from originator companies with little use of law. Amidst monopolies and scarcity of doses, vaccine nationalism fatally undermined this effort. Whether more synergistic law and governance emerges from rapidly changing global health law will likely dictate the efficacy of future global infectious disease response.

Over the past ten years, global health lawyers have actively engaged with noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). A pivotal instrument in this regard is the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2003. Despite its open-ended wording, it has significantly influenced domestic tobacco regulation. For instance, thanks to this treaty, the Dutch government no longer engages with the tobacco industry and has (independent from the tobacco industry) implemented various tobacco control measures, resulting in a significant reduction in smoking. The treaty also serves as an exemplary model for the adoption of similar treaties to regulate other behavioral risk factors such as unhealthy diets and alcohol use, as well as broader environmental determinants.

This paper reflects on the availability of a key document in the research integrity landscape: Reports of institutional and university misconduct investigations. It reviews how universities have typically responded to calls for disclosure, offers suggestions to mitigate concerns, and argues that the failure to release such reports creates a critical evidence gap. It closes with a call for disclosure of such reports as a default.