Jigisha Patel on ‘Publish or Perish’, Research Integrity, and Peer Review

It is Peer Review Week 2022! So, this episode, hosted by Nikesh Gosalia and Jayashree Rajagopalan, features research integrity specialist, Jigisha Patel! Jigisha talks about her career journey from being a medical doctor to a journal editor. Based on her extensive experience in publishing, Jigisha shares her observations on common research integrity dilemmas, from plagiarism to authorship disputes. She also discusses industry efforts for overcoming these problems and the possibility of using AI-based solutions. 

Jigisha addresses the connection between research integrity and peer review; she talks about how the Peer Review Steering Committee has given her a more positive perspective of the peer review process. She also touches on a current challenge affecting the peer review process – peer review being used as a mere stamp of approval with the actual content of the reviews being sidelined. To wrap up, Jigisha talks about the ‘publish or perish’ culture that is pervasive in scientific research and the need to evolve current research culture toward one that rewards research integrity. 

Jigisha Patel is an independent research integrity specialist and founder of Jigisha Patel Research Integrity Limited. After training as a medical doctor, she transitioned into the world of publishing with a special focus on research integrity, peer review, and medical research ethics. Jigisha is an elected member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Council. She can be contacted through her website or Twitter

Nikesh Gosalia

Hi, everyone. Welcome to All Things SciComm!

Peer review underpins the quality and integrity of scientific publishing. It is considered the cornerstone of scientific publishing. As such, it attracts a lot of interest because of the integral role it plays in the dissemination of research.

Today is the first day of Peer Review Week 2022 and this is a great time to take a closer look at peer review.

As most of you may know, Peer Review Week is an annual global event that celebrates the role of peer review in the scholarly publishing process. The theme for Peer Review Week 2022 is ‘Research Integrity: Creating and Building Trust in Research,’ a topic that opens up a lot of very interesting avenues of discussion. This is exactly what we are focusing on today about how we can build sustainable peer review processes to foster research integrity.

I have with me two members of the Peer Review Week Steering Committee, Jayashree Rajagopalan, who is also my co-host for this Peer Review Week episode, and Jigisha Patel.

Nikesh Gosalia

A bit about my co-host for today, Jayashree Rajagopalan.

Jayashree and I know each other for over 15 years now. Jayashree leads community engagement activities at CACTUS. She works on building a safe and supportive community for researchers, a space where they can have open conversations about the highs and lows of academic life, exchange shared experiences, give and get advice, support, and knowledge, and grow as academics and individuals in the process.

Jayashree has been part of the Peer Review Week Steering Committee for several years now and has been co-chairing Peer Review Week since 2021 edition. When she isn’t building a community, Jayashree is busy binge-watching crime-based series, reading fantasy fiction, playing with her boisterous cats, or manifesting a post-pandemic world with no travel restrictions.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

Hi, Nikesh.

Nikesh Gosalia

Let me also introduce everyone to Jigisha.

Jigisha is formally a medical doctor, clinical researcher, and medical journal editor. Jigisha is an independent research integrity specialist and founder of Jigisha Patel Research Integrity Limited. She led the first team dedicated to maintaining research integrity at BioMed Central and was head of programme management for the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group. She has extensive experience of managing a wide range of research integrity issues in publishing, including the investigation and management of complex cases such as peer review manipulation in paper mills. She now uses her experience to help journals and publishers to resolve complex cases of research misconduct and provides a variety of training for journal editors, publishers and institutions on research integrity, including a CDP-certified course on research integrity strategy. She is an independent elected member of COPE Council and Senior Associate Affiliate with Maverick Publishing Specialists.

Jigisha Patel

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Nikesh Gosalia

Thank you. Thank you, Jigisha.

In this Peer Review Week ‘s special episode, Jayashree and I hope to have a candid conversation with Jigisha about her experience as a research integrity specialist. Of course, we’ll talk about peer review and research integrity as a whole.
Let’s dive in.

Nikesh Gosalia

Your experience is really interesting and varied, and that’s what I wanted to begin the conversation with. You trained as a medical doctor, worked in clinical practice, went on to get a Ph.D. in Clinical Physiology, and eventually moved to publishing. I can see how this would have equipped you with a really wide lens to view the entire cycle of research and its dissemination. Could you tell us a bit more about your transition from clinical practice to scholarly publishing?

Jigisha Patel

I mean, like most people, when I started out, I thought my career path was set. Medicine is a very set, clear path towards becoming – and I thought I would become an NHS consultant at some point. But life gets in the way.

Two things happened. First of all, I was very interested in doing clinical research which is why while I was still a medic I did clinical research which involved giving humans various interventions. This was research in healthy people whose physiology – and people with diabetes and obesity. And part of that taught me a lot about ethics, the ethics of clinical research and doing research in humans. Already I was thinking, well, I am moving away from just wanting to be a clinician because I quite enjoyed doing the research part, as well the academic part as well.

But anyway, regardless of all of these sorts of interests, I reached a point where I had to make a really difficult decision because I had a young family and I had to decide, well, which path now do I follow, because I didn’t want to miss out on my family as well. It was while I was sort of in the throes of this dilemma that I saw an advert for a job at BMC for an Associate Medical Editor and it listed the requirements of the job. And I thought, I can do this. I ticked all the boxes. I applied and got the job. That was how it happened. There was no grand plan or strategic exit from one to the other. It’s just because life forced me to make this choice at that point in time.

I didn’t know anything about publishing at that time. I had come from clinical practice and research world. I had published a couple of things, so I vaguely understood the process. But I really went back to the bottom rung of the ladder and had to relearn or learn this whole new industry from scratch. But it was the best thing I did. I mean, I don’t look back from there at all. Then I guess during that process as well, I started off as a medical editor and so it was very much focused on looking after the content of medical journals. But then what happened was that I became interested in research integrity. Again, this wasn’t a planned thing. Because I was looking after content in medical journals, at the time research integrity wasn’t a thing, everybody trusted everything that was submitted, nobody questioned.

I think because of my clinical experience of having been very much involved in doing clinical research and involved in ethics committees and the questions they asked, when I was in an editor role and looking at the content that was being submitted and manuscripts that were being submitted, things were coming up which I was thinking there’s something odd about this, there’s something worrying about this research.

I was very lucky at that time to be working very close to where the Committee on Publication Ethics used to hold its forum discussions. And at that time that was a group of editors who came together to support each other to deal with research integrity issues. Because they were so close, the forum meetings were so close, I used to go there to learn about research integrity and learn how to manage my own issues with my editorial hat. So, that again was sort of an organic progression from editor to sort of interest in research integrity. That’s how I drifted into this in a way,

but in a really positive way I think.

Nikesh Gosalia

You have been actively involved in helping journals, publishers, and institutions maintain and address issues related to research integrity. In your experience, what are some of the most common research integrity issues you would find yourself stepping in to resolve? A second part to this question, what did resolution involve in these cases?

Jigisha Patel

As an editor, the kind of things I saw right at the beginning were, in the medical world, in clinical research, it was questions around consent, and the ethical oversight of research. That’s one whole group which is very specific to medicine and clinical research. But then, really common things that occur if you are an editor are accusations of plagiarism, disputes over authorship are two big, time-consuming concerns. Then there are things like accusations that data has been fabricated or falsified, or data has been stolen.

A researcher may be visiting an institution, does some work with somebody, and then goes away and publishes that work. And then the other researcher said, oh, they stole our work. And so, they are sort of trying to resolve or deal with this issue that is usually brought to the editor, so it’s quite varied. Occasionally, various other things crop up. Complicated cases that you would never imagine, but they come up.

I guess the resolution is all around the whole purpose or the whole purpose of being an editor. The point of being an editor is to curate what is submitted, so deciding what is published and being responsible for it. Being able to say I stand by what’s published in my journal, I stand by the honesty and integrity of that journal.

If something is wrong with what has been published or something is wrong with what has been submitted, resolving it means either deciding that you are not going to publish it; or if you have already published it, resolving it means making sure that that record is corrected in some way so that readers know. If there’s an issue, the readers are aware of it. Or if there’s an issue that can be fixed or corrected, it is corrected.

The ultimate aim is always to make sure that the published record is correct and trustworthy. That’s the resolution part. That should be the ultimate aim of any investigation if you are an editor, of an allegation.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

I am really excited to speak to you. I have been wanting to have this conversation with you. First things first, thank you for sharing your journey with us about how organic it was. I speak to a lot of researchers who say that they are at a crossroads in their lives. They have personal commitments, and they also have professional aspirations. They are trying to decide what should I do. Should I leave academia? Should I step out? Should I do something else?

I think it’s really interesting, the career choices that you’ve made, or how things sort of fell in line for you, because I feel like you left academia, but you are still very much part of it. I think that’s fantastic. That sort of gives you a very different lens to look at all of the things that you are speaking about.

We are discussing research integrity a lot. One of the most important aspects here that is related to research integrity is peer review. You are part of the Peer Review Week Steering Committee. What we are discussing this year today as part of Peer Review Week is research integrity and how can we create and build this trust in research. How close is this to you?

Jigisha Patel

I mean, I haven’t been involved in the Peer Review Steering Committee for a long while. I joined last year, quite late in the planning, and just helped out a little bit with admin and things. This year, I am really excited to be part of it at a much earlier stage.

One of the reasons for me is that when it comes to peer review or research integrity, they are often seen as two separate things, two separate processes. If I do deal with peer review, it’s usually because something has gone wrong with it. There’s some misconduct or integrity issue related to the peer review. For me, I get quite a skewed or cynical view of peer review and how it operates. Taking part in Peer Review Week helps me get a much more broader perspective on what the whole community is thinking around peer review. It brings more positive things into focus for me, so that I can see peer review in a much more sort of a positive context where the whole community is working together, discussing issues, but also discussing the great things that peer review can do and how to make it even better.

That was my motivation to just get involved in Peer Review Week, because it’s brilliant to just see the whole community during that week of doing things. There’s so much activity happening during the week. It’s very exciting this year that it is talking about research integrity. Because peer review is regarded as the measure of integrity. Something, if it’s being peer reviewed, it’s viewed as being trustworthy.

I think we should be asking questions about is that a right assumption to make. What can we do to make sure that that is correct, that is a correct assumption to make? That all ties in with research integrity and the trustworthiness of the published record. It’s very much sort of my topic and my sort of interest. This year, I am glad I was able to get involved quite early on and maybe take a more active role in it.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

Jigisha, one of the things I have always felt is, you know, how you use certain words and you make mental associations with them. Words like integrity, ethics, the first thought that you have in your mind is negative. The first association that we make with these words is negative. What I am really interested to see is how conversations around Peer Review Week this year treat the subject of research integrity. Are we looking at it negatively?

Like you said, maybe for you because you are looking at it on a daily basis and you are looking at it much more closely, it does, I am really sorry, sound like it’s all doom and gloom. But I am really interested to see what the community says about it. We have Peer Review Week, which is one kind of community-led event. There is another community that you are part of which is the Peer Review Congress. I just wanted to understand your role in it and how has it been.

Jigisha Patel

I have a longer relationship with the Peer Review Congress. I started probably 12 years ago that I first went to a Congress meeting, which was really interesting for me because it was the first time I saw research being done by journal editors about research integrity and peer review. That was a novelty for me. Over the years, I have contributed, I have submitted research, presented in posters, and then more recently joined the Advisory Committee and helped out with, in some cases, moderating or chairing sessions when they were live. The last one was a live session. But also helping out with peer reviewing the submissions as well. That’s part of the role of the Advisory Committee, what I have done.

But I mean I think the Peer Review Congress is very important as well because that’s where research on research integrity and peer review is presented. That’s a sort of correlation of the research fields because there’s very little funding, or specialization purely in research integrity.

People do this research on top of what they are already doing on the side, probably without dedicated funding, and yet they still managed to get this research done and out there. The Peer Review Congress is a great sort of platform to talk about this research.

That’s another really satisfying initiative to have been involved in over the years.

Nikesh Gosalia

Jigisha, based on your experience with publishers, and as someone who now helps different stakeholders maintain research integrity, what do you think are some of the biggest threats or barriers that make it really tough for us as an industry to maintain research integrity?

Jigisha Patel

I think one of the biggest barriers is admitting that there is a problem with research integrity, because within the publishing industry, many publishers are in competition with each other. They are competing to get authors to submit to their journals. And so, there’s a reluctance to admit a problem because then it makes them look bad. How could they let this happen? But the ironic thing is that all of them, everybody has got the same problems happening to them. And not talking about these problems is what makes it really difficult to manage them and handle them and address the issue.

That’s one barrier that is still there, but I think is improving as different publishers and journals are realizing that they are not alone with their issues, and therefore they are beginning to talk more and more. There are various initiatives that are encouraging this to happen.

One of the ways this is improving, one of the ways this barrier of not wanting to talk about research integrity issues is being addressed is, first of all their hope is doing work and actually doing research and asking publishers what the issues are, particularly around papermills. Earlier this year, there was a report published by COPE and STM jointly on the issue of papermills.

One of the recommendations there was that there should be a collaborative approach to using technology in developing tools to address the issue of papermills. There’s also the STM Research Integrity Hub, which is another initiative which is trying to bring together experience, expertise, and actually pool data, again, in the hope of developing tools that will help to detect and screen for submissions which have research integrity issues.

I mean, if you’d asked me this question sort of five years ago, it would have been quite bleak, I think. I would have said, oh, nobody is talking to each other because they are all too worried about how it might impact on them. But I think this year particularly, I have an optimistic view about bringing these barriers down because there’s a lot of talk about collaboration and working together now within the industry to tackle the big research integrity issues.

Nikesh Gosalia

You briefly mentioned about possible tools. In your opinion, is there a technology solution, an AI-based solution possible to kind of address this issue? Because there have been some conversations, even I have had with some of the publisher partners who have maybe inquired that do you have some solution in place. But I just wanted to hear your thoughts in terms of is there a technology solution possible?

Jigisha Patel

This is a really tough question because it’s so easy to be quite extreme in your views about AI. It takes a bit of effort to be objective about it, but also cautious as well. I mean I think we always have to remember that AI isn’t the solution to everything. People get excited about technology and innovation and think, oh, we’ll use AI and that will help fix this problem. But with research integrity, it is such a complicated and nuanced field in terms of the issues that come up. I think there always needs to be a human brain involved in the final analysis and decision making.
But having said that, certainly, the use of technology like AI helps to speed up processes. In my work, I spend a lot of time manually looking at data, just looking at spreadsheets of information to detect what’s going on. I am sure AI could probably do it much more accurately and faster than my brain can do it. There are jobs like that where I think AI would be perfect, perfectly suited to be useful.

It is a balance and I would say don’t get too carried away in thinking AI is going to solve everything and fix everything. Because you need some human with editorial expertise, an expertise in research integrity to make the final judgment.

But also, don’t go the other way and think AI is terrible and will ruin everything either. There are certain jobs in the process which it will be perfect for. We just have to be very cautious, objective, and ask lots of questions along the way every time we think about using AI. Are we using it for the right purpose? What are the potential pitfalls of using it? It has to be a steady, cautious approach without damning it altogether.

We can’t avoid AI. It’s everywhere already. We have to face up that we are going to have to deal with it. We just need to go into it with our eyes open and sensible brains on, our presentable brain in action.

Nikesh Gosalia

Brilliant! That’s a great insight, Jigisha.

Moving on, but slightly related, Jigisha, as far as the peer review process is concerned, what would you identify as specific threats to that process?

Jigisha Patel

The problem at the moment I see with peer review is that it is seen as a method for validating research but all of the innovation focuses on the process. So, it’s sort of moving away from journals, it’s sort of making it sort of more – there’s community peer review, and there’s collaborative peer review, and post-publication peer review. It’s the process that people are focusing on rather than the content.

The fact that something has been peer reviewed seems to be seen as a validation, whereas if we are going to move away from that curation of peer review reports which is what a journal editor does, if we are going to move away from that then the content of the peer review reports themselves matter a lot more.

If you see, for example, with preprint, it’s not okay to just say it’s been peer reviewed. The next question should be, and what did the peer review report say? And the next question should be, and who were the people, how were they qualified to judge? The next question should be, how valid are the comments of the peer review given their qualification?

That level of scrutiny of peer review I don’t see happening. I see peer review as just being used as the stamp of approval. If it has been peer reviewed, it’s been validated. That’s one big threat I think. We need to rein it in and think a bit more again about this process and how we are going to curate peer review reports.

The other thing, it’s also getting more and more complicated because of the different types of innovation. To the point that for journal peer review there’s even been a taxonomy developed to just classify different types of peer review for journals themselves. You can see, it’s getting very complicated and probably focusing on the wrong thing if it’s just about the process and not about the content and quality of the peer review. I’d like to see more of that, more focus on the quality of peer review.

Nikesh Gosalia

At a macro level, what do issues around integrity indicate about the culture of scientific research?

Jigisha Patel

I think, in general, I mean we have to mention the publish or perish culture, which is a really strong driving force for research misconduct, the whole careers, funding, jobs, all depend very much on publishing in journals with impact factors or getting lots of citations as well. That is the biggest picture is that the culture is driving the problem. There needs to be a drive now in the opposite direction to change that culture, to reward behaviors that support the integrity of research, that support to validating research in an objective way, and that includes peer review as well. Peer reviews don’t get much reward for their work. Perhaps, the culture should be changing and rewarding that behavior rather than getting lots of citations for your publications.

I guess very much closely related to changing the culture is promoting Open Science, because that is what validates research. Open Science facilitates activities that reproduce other people’s research. It’s a reproduction of other people’s research and finding similar findings, which is the objective validation of the research.

Peer review is a sort of, I don’t want to say a screening mechanism. It is a faster way of checking, doing a superficial check that this is probably okay. This is in line with what science expects. This is in line with what the peers would expect a piece of research to be like. But the actual objective validation is when somebody else does it, does the same research and gets same or similar findings.

That’s the kind of behavior we want to reward in the culture rather than the number of publications or where you have published. Collaboration is something else we should reward rather than individual person’s achievements or glory. Because I think that’s another thing about the culture is that people want to pursue their own personal – want to develop their own personal name and achieve personal glory. Maybe we should be rewarding the people who don’t do that, who seem to collaborate with others and share the data and share that expertise, abilities, and things.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

Speaking of cultures, I have always viewed this as a two-pronged, I don’t want to use the word ‘problem’ but I still want to. It’s a problem of culture in two directions. One is how the entire academic progression system has a structure, and it’s been that way for years. We haven’t questioned it. We are probably beginning to do it. But for a large part, for most of the time for that single early career researcher who’s probably in the third year or the fourth year of their Ph.D., or for someone who is a postdoc, the challenges are real, and the system hasn’t changed for them. I think on the one hand it’s a problem with the research culture. And on the other, I also see it as very slow evolution or adaptation of the entire publishing workflow. Here we are, speaking about how peer review could possibly evolve. We are looking at preprints. The pandemic made us think about the need for speed in a completely different way. It questioned everything that we were doing. We wanted important research fast. We wanted the research that we are getting fast to also be credible.

I feel like the pandemic just made us look at ourselves. It was like looking in a mirror and it gave us a reality check. I feel the problem is still two-pronged. It’s the academic culture on the one hand, and it’s also how the publishing system works. What you said was very interesting. For me, I personally relate to it because I speak to so many researchers on a daily basis. I think it’s the institution-publisher partnership and collaboration which I think is key. And I feel a larger gap here might still exist across continents or countries. I think bridging the cultural gaps here will also be really, really key. I think that would truly make this a sort of global movement, a global conversation. That is probably how we’ll see real impact.

Speaking of different stakeholders, we have a lot of guidelines now for authors on publication ethics or best practices to follow. Do we have something similar for journals and publishers or institutions?

Jigisha Patel

My experience with COPE, which when I first joined publishing COPE was also a growing organization which mostly had journal editors as its members. But that has also grown over the years and now it has journal editors as members and publishers as members. This year, it’s also going to open up membership to universities as well and is working on developing that plan. Over the years, COPE has been developing standards and processes for journal editors and publishers to follow. And setting and actually facilitating the agreement of standards so that everybody agrees to the same standards, because that’s another issue particularly between journals and institutions.

Because a journal might have a set of standards about authorship. And authorship is one of those issues that occurs quite often where authors often don’t realize the importance of authorship or what authorship means. It means taking responsibility for the content of the article. It’s not just a name on top of the article. You are taking responsibility and accountability. Journals see this and may have this in their policies. But they are not equipped to investigate who deserves to be an author because they cannot investigate who did the research. This is something the institutions need to do.

But when the institutions are approached for help with authorship disputes, sometimes, not all, but sometimes institutions are completely bemused by this request, because they will say, well, surely, it’s up to the authors to decide, it’s up to the researchers to decide how they organize their authorship. Here, you can see this, the expectations are very different or the standards set by the two different industries or organizations are very different.

I think what COPE is trying to do with institutions is to try and bring that back and bring that balance so that everybody is on the same page, everybody agrees on what the standards are, so that when things go wrong, everybody is working towards the same set of standards.

In answer to your question, what guidelines there are for editors and publishers, I would obviously say that COPE has many guidelines and standards set out for publishers to follow.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

When there’s a case of dispute or a potential breach of ethics or if it’s a research integrity issue and there’s a conversation between a journal and an author, how smooth is this conversation? How easy is it do you think for authors to understand exactly what the journal editor is trying to say and how easy or difficult is it for the journal editor to understand the author’s explanation or point of view.

Jigisha Patel

Well, this is the heart of the work that I do, because I have made the mistakes. When I first started out dealing with research integrities, I have dealt with thousands of cases of research misconduct and allegations, so I am able to anticipate the consequences of every communication. And how you communicate is so important. Because remember, you are telling an author or a researcher that somebody has made an allegation against them, and if you put yourself in their shoes, you can imagine that they might feel angry or hurt or worried or frightened or whatever because somebody is actually telling them they are doing something wrong.

It’s all about how your approach authors when an allegation is made can actually make or break an investigation and it can determine the course that that investigation takes. It can become very sort of adversarial or it can go smoothly depending on how that happens.

The problem is that for most of the time, editors are editing. They are not dealing with research misconduct. They are not research integrity specialists. They are editors, so they don’t have the experience repeatedly. They may have one or two. They won’t have that experience. Therefore, it can be very challenging for an editor to even approach somebody and say somebody has made an allegation against you. It’s not a pleasant thing to have to do at all. It’s not a nice part of your day job to have to write that email.

That all illustrates the real need to build support systems and expertise to help editors deal with research integrity. And that’s what I endeavor to do is to help editors set up processes, help editors understand how they can approach authors to make this whole process smoother and easier. Because it’s quite a stressful job, if everybody is complaining, everybody else is doing everything wrong. There’s a lot of conflict when you are dealing with research integrity, allegations of research misconduct, and research integrity issues.

The trick is to preempt the problems and make sure that researchers, the authors who are submitting to journals, they are aware of what is expected of them. Because they won’t have had, many of those won’t have had any actual training on research integrity or won’t be aware of best practice. They are following what their colleagues are doing. They might be following what their supervisors are doing. Their supervisors may not be following best practice either. They may be innocently doing things that they don’t realize are not the best thing to do. To be fair to them, journals should set out what their expectations are upfront. That really also makes a huge difference as well.

Nikesh Gosalia

In an ideal world, all stakeholders, which is funders, institutions, authors, journal editors, publishers, peer reviewers, they understand each other and collaborate towards the common goal of sharing credible research. But that doesn’t necessarily happen always. Why so?

Jigisha Patel

Certainly, there’s a lack of awareness in the first place that there is an issue where gaps need to be filled in. There’s also a lack of expertise which is what I described earlier. Even if these different stakeholders are aware, they may not actually know what to do about it. Then there’s also a lack of agreement of what standards should be, as I have mentioned, and then there’s a lack of collaboration and actual communication or opportunities to collaborate and communicate.

Often these different stakeholders are operating in parallel with very little sort of cross-communication, although they are all part of the same science and publishing ecosystem. There’s no cross-talk between them. All of those things can contribute to misunderstandings and discrepancies in what standards should be and complications.

Nikesh Gosalia

You have played multiple roles so far as a researcher, author, reviewer, editor, and now a consultant. How did each influence the other, and is there any one specific role that’s closest to your heart?

Jigisha Patel

All my roles have sort of laid the foundations for the next role. I couldn’t have been an author without being a researcher. I couldn’t have been an effective reviewer without being an author. I can’t be a good editor without knowing what authors and reviewers do. It’s like each one has been a stone that’s helped me step to the next role. Of course, as you get older, your viewpoint about what work is all about changes.

As I said, I started off thinking I was on a fixed path that was already predefined for me. Over the years, I have come to realize that actually, no, I am more in charge of my path. I can actually change and the world won’t end. I can do different things that interest me and it’s all fine. It leads to a happier life. In terms of which one really speaks to me is what I do now. Because I very much believe that we should be sharing experience and helping each other and that’s exactly what I do.

If I was working for one organization, I wouldn’t be able to then go and help somebody else. I would be tied up with one organization. What I do now means I am free to go and help people with my experience, hopefully to make things better. I do it on my terms as I want to do it. Of course, I think this is where I want to be. Absolutely!

Nikesh Gosalia

How do you keep yourself updated about the industry as a whole?

Jigisha Patel

One of the many things I do every morning, I have signed up to lots of newsletters, that’s always a useful thing to do, lots of industry newsletters, and I go through every morning and see what’s happened in the world of publishing and research integrity. You usually know when something’s happened because the same story will be in every single newsletter that I look at. That’s one of the things I do.

Then, also, when I am creating my own training or writing, I am doing a lot of research anyway. I am reading what articles have been published, what research people have done into various aspects of research integrity. And then the activities I do with COPE, Peer Review Congress, Peer Review Week, things like that also keep me informed on what’s going on.

It’s such a fast-moving industry. It’s very dynamic. I mean, I still miss things, I still sort of realize that, oh, something has happened and I only just found out about it because it’s such a fast-moving dynamic. There are things happening all the time.

Nikesh Gosalia

Thank you, Jigisha, for joining the conversation on All Things SciComm! Both Jayashree and I really enjoyed, and I am sure all the listeners are going to enjoy this particular conversation as well.

Jayashree Rajagopalan

Thank you, Jigisha. It felt really great speaking to you. Thank you, Nikesh, for being such a fantastic host as always.

Jigisha Patel

Thank you so much. It has been a real pleasure to have been invited to take part.

Nikesh Gosalia

Thank you everyone for joining us. You can subscribe to this podcast on all major podcast platforms. Stay tuned for our next episode.

All Things SciComm is a weekly podcast brought to you by ScienceTalks. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.