Imposters and Impersonators in Preprints: How do we trust authors in Open Science?

In this Scholarly Kitchen post, Leslie D. McIntosh founder and CEO of Ripeta, tackles indicators of trust, and the curious cases of imposters and impersonators in covid preprints. Leslie walks us through an example to illustrate how open science practices have been manipulated through fake authorship.

Known challenges exist and these include fake peer reviewers, paper mills, and falsified institutional affiliations. These challenges offer us all the opportunity to discuss as a community the checks and balances we can put in place. Now is the time to build a coalition – to foster credibility and integrity into the open science ecosystem.