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| ACM Committee on Publication Ethics | |
|---|---|
| Name | ACM Committee on Publication Ethics |
| Formation | 21st century |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Parent organization | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Leader title | Chair |
| Website | ACM publications |
ACM Committee on Publication Ethics The ACM Committee on Publication Ethics provides standards and oversight for ethical practices in Association for Computing Machinery publications, engaging stakeholders across the computing, information technology, and scholarly publishing communities. It interacts with editors, authors, reviewers, and institutions including IEEE, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGPLAN, ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGSOFT, and other technical communities to address authorship, peer review, and integrity issues. The committee’s work is situated within broader publishing ecosystems involving Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, and standards bodies such as Committee on Publication Ethics and CrossRef.
The committee emerged amid publishing reforms influenced by events at institutions like Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Cambridge and by debates at conferences such as SIGMOD Conference, PLDI, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, KDD, NeurIPS, and ICML. Early milestones overlapped with initiatives from Association for Computing Machinery leadership, collaborations with Council of Science Editors, dialogues involving National Academy of Sciences, and interactions with publishers including Taylor & Francis and SAGE Publications. High-profile cases in computing and adjacent fields—linked to individuals affiliated with Google Research, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Facebook AI Research, Amazon Science, Bell Labs, and Hewlett-Packard—helped define mandates. Influences included public inquiries like those at UCL, policy shifts at Nature Publishing Group, and legal frameworks such as decisions arising from United States Court of Appeals cases that touched on scholarly conduct.
The committee articulates objectives resonant with standards from Committee on Publication Ethics and aims to align ACM practices with guidance from International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, World Health Organization, UNESCO, and professional societies like Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Association for Computing Machinery subgroups. Scope covers authorship disputes involving scholars from Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Oxford, and ETH Zurich; plagiarism allegations connected to work submitted by researchers at Peking University, Tsinghua University, National University of Singapore, and University of Toronto; and data concerns intersecting with repositories such as arXiv, Zenodo, Figshare, and Dataverse. Ethical remit spans peer review integrity relevant to conferences like ICSE, SOSP, OSDI, Usenix, and journals like Communications of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and ACM Computing Surveys.
Membership includes representatives from ACM governance bodies such as ACM Council, ACM Publications Board, ACM Ethics and Pluralism Council, and diverse SIGs including SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGBED, SIGPLAN, and SIGWEB. Members are drawn from academic institutions (e.g., Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington), corporate labs (e.g., Microsoft Research Redmond, Google DeepMind, IBM Watson), and professional organizations like Association for Information Science and Technology and American Society for Engineering Education. Governance features elected chairs, liaisons to editorial boards of venues such as IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, and advisory roles with SPARC and OpenAI policy teams. Committees operate under bylaws modeled after those of Association for Computing Machinery and consult legal counsel experienced with United States District Court matters when necessary.
Policies synthesize norms from Committee on Publication Ethics, publishing standards from International Organization for Standardization, and recommendations from National Institutes of Health on research data. Guidelines address authorship criteria that reference practices at University of Cambridge, conflict-of-interest disclosure relevant to European Commission grant rules, handling of image manipulation noted in cases at Nature, and protocols for retractions paralleling procedures used by Retraction Watch-highlighted journals. Documents cover peer review confidentiality as practiced at Science (journal), editorial independence echoed in statements by The Lancet, and appeals processes informed by precedents from American Arbitration Association.
The committee runs training and outreach, offering workshops at conferences such as SIGMOD, CHI, ICML, NeurIPS, PLDI, and FAccT and webinars co-hosted with CrossRef, ORCID, JSTOR, Portico, and arXiv. It issues case studies reflecting disputes from institutions like University of Michigan and Brown University, curates best-practice toolkits integrating Open Science Framework and GitHub workflows, and pilots policy experiments with journals including ACM Transactions on Graphics and ACM Transactions on Networking. Initiatives include collaboration with funders such as National Science Foundation, European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, and policy bodies like Office of Research Integrity.
The committee advises editorial boards for ACM venues including Communications of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Computing Surveys, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, and conference proceedings for SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI. It provides recommendations to the ACM Publications Board and to editors-in-chief who manage editorial processes similar to those at IEEE Spectrum and Elsevier journals. Coordination extends to production partners and indexing services such as Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and CrossRef to ensure metadata accuracy, correction notices, and retraction statements.
Critiques have focused on perceived conflicts with editorial autonomy cited by editors from Nature Communications, Science Advances, and independent publishers; tensions with open-access advocates at PLOS and eLife; and debates with researchers from University of California, Los Angeles and New York University over enforcement consistency. Some scholars affiliated with Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania have challenged the committee’s scope in handling interdisciplinary cases involving bioinformatics collaborations with Broad Institute and industry partnerships with Intel Labs and NVIDIA Research. Other controversies mirror disputes in venues like Nature, Science (journal), and major conferences where calls for greater transparency have been raised by groups including Retraction Watch and policy advocates at COPE.