Know More About Publication Ethics: An Interview With Christina Bennett

About Christina Bennett

Dr. Christina Bennett is the Associate Publisher, Ethics and Policy at the American Physiological Society (APS), Bethesda, Maryland. In her current position, Christina handles ethical issues that arise in the 14 journals published by APS. Christina majored in Biochemistry and minored in Bioethics, and then joined the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology of the University of Michigan. In January 2011, she joined APS as the Publications Ethics Manager and was responsible for handling a range of issues such as copyright, corrections, and plagiarism to screening for digital manipulation of images. As a faculty member of the Short Course on Publication Ethics at CSE, she discusses issues such as how to check for digital manipulation, how to resolve problems that are identified, and what tools are available to help editors and journals to identify tampering of images and data.

About the Interview

In this interview series, we will take you through the various issues that the American Physiological Society follows to overcome the editorial and ethical challenges faced by their journals. Christina shared some thoughts on how APS continues to improve its ethical guidelines and how they resolve disputes between researchers, peer reviewers, and institutions in cases where ethical misconduct has been reported. Christina also shares some details about her involvement at CSE and highlights of her session on “Detecting Misconduct in Images” at the 2016 ISMTE conference at Philadelphia, PA. She also shares some useful tips that would help early-career professionals avoid misconduct and discuss some future challenges in identifying ethical and research misconduct in the coming decades.