Beyond Integrity: Why Quality Is the Next Frontier for the Research Record

A paper can pass every integrity check and still be bad science. That gap is where the research record is most exposed right now.

The tools built over the last two decades were designed to catch fraud: suspicious co-authorships, citation rings, fabricated data, AI-generated text. Useful signals, all of them. But clearing the fraud bar is not the same as being good science, and with AI-assisted submissions up 30 percent, the volume arriving at that bar has never been higher.

As large language models become the first place researchers meet the literature, what clears the bar does not just sit in the record. It gets ingested and surfaced as fact. Quality control at the point of publication becomes quality control for everything downstream.

In this Platform Strategies 2026 panel, Cashmere co-founder Jonathan Woahn joins Dawn Melley of IEEE and Miriam Maus of IOP Publishing, with Dustin Smith of Hum moderating, to make the case for quality as the next line publishers have to defend.

You will leave with a clearer view of where integrity tooling stops, what a quality signal would actually have to measure, and what publishers can put in place before the models decide for them.