Digital Science has awarded its latest Catalyst Grants to two innovative teams, supporting their technology ideas aimed at safeguarding research integrity and strengthening trust in science.
The winners will use the funding and mentorship from Digital Science to develop their ideas, both of which include enhanced dashboards – visualizations based on available data – to flag retracted or questionable research papers.
The winning applications from Digital Science’s 2024 Catalyst Grant round announced today are:
- PostPub – led by Dr Achal Agrawal (Founder), with Dr Moumita Koley (Senior Research Analyst, DST-Center for Policy Research, and Research Fellow, RoRI, UK)
- VIRUS (Visualization of Irregular Research Under Scrutiny) – led by Dr Lonni Besançon, with Dr Fabrice Frank
PostPub – based in India
This team aims to address a lack of awareness of research misconduct as well as a lack of accountability for those engaged in it. PostPub, which has already established its own Retraction Dashboard, will draw on Digital Science data to extend the dashboard. The dashboard will visualize gaps in the data-sharing practices of researchers across countries and journals, and journal response times when integrity issues are flagged, and will flag irregular activity. PostPub also aims to create a notification system to alert responsible parties about these irregularities, and to track actions taken, helping to improve accountability in research.
VIRUS – based in Sweden
This team is developing a real-time visualization system and dashboard intended to be used by scientific “sleuths”, as well as research integrity teams from publishers, editorial teams in journals, and universities. The system will keep records of papers that have been flagged as questionable, as well as their impact on several scholarly measures – such as citations, altmetrics, and policy attention – to better understand the potentially harmful impact these papers could have. The team aims to move away from smaller, curated subsets of papers to using much wider databases, such as Digital Science’s own Dimensions, the world’s most complete database of linked research information.
PostPub’s Dr Achal Agrawal said: “We are honored to receive the Catalyst Grant from Digital Science, enabling us to take the research integrity work we have begun to the next stage of development. Through our work, we hope to incentivize researchers, universities and publishers to do the right thing and encourage greater responsibility for research integrity. In the long term, we hope our work will help in reducing research malpractices and increase transparency with respect to actions taken by various stakeholders.”
VIRUS’s Dr Lonni Besançon said: “We are both happy and honoured to receive this Catalyst Grant from Digital Science in what we hope to be a successful venture coordinated with the research and sleuthing of Forensics Scientometrics. We believe our system has a particularly important role to play in visually assessing and communicating the impact of questionable papers which are still cited or used in policy documents or clinical guidelines. We hope VIRUS will make it easier to prioritize investigations and editorial decisions and help provide a faster and more efficient decontamination of the scientific literature. Ultimately, we anticipate that this work will be the first of a long collaboration with Digital Science and its amazing team.”
Digital Science CEO Dr Daniel Hook said: “I congratulate our new winners of the Digital Science Catalyst Grant. Each of this year’s winners has approached a key issue of research integrity from an innovative angle, and focusing on practical solutions that have the potential to safeguard research and build people’s trust in science. I also want to thank Dr Leslie McIntosh, a prior Catalyst winner and VP Research Integrity at Digital Science, for working with our Catalyst team, headed by Steve Scott, to bring about this integrity-focussed Catalyst Grant. We look forward to mentoring the successful teams to make the most of the Catalyst Grant and to take their ideas to wider audiences.”
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science, said: “We’ve been impressed by the excellence of this year’s entries in the Digital Science Catalyst Grant. Our focus this year on research integrity demonstrates our commitment to addressing some of the biggest issues facing the research ecosystem today. The innovative solutions presented by our winning teams show great promise, and we’re excited to see where they will go from here.”
