As a treat for our authors, and maybe a small demonstration of our power, we offered free image integrity/accessibility screens to all the authors who edited a paper with us in March. We found a slew of minor issues, such as low-resolution images, but two things stood out. First, accessibility to readers with impaired color vision is not on scientists’ radar––almost two thirds of papers had some issues related to this. Check out our blog post on accessible color schemes and contact us for help with figure preparation.

Second, and more concerning, we found inappropriate image re-use (same images, but different labels) in about one in five papers. Moreover, although software is super helpful in finding image re-use within and between papers, our eagle-eyed editors routinely find duplicated images that software missed. Our image integrity analysis for journal clients has shown us that inappropriate re-use of images occurs a lot, but it’s mostly a result of human error, where files get mixed up, rather than attempted fraud. However, submitting a paper where this has occurred can get your paper rejected, flagged as potential fraud, and possibly posted on sites such as PubPeer.

Saving authors from potential embarrassment (or worse!) and helping educate them on best practices is all part of our non-judgmental, collegial approach. We can’t guarantee that we will find every image issue––but if you are working with a large number of images, or in a large collaboration, or publishing a journal, contact us if you want us to check figures for your manuscript.

In addition, image integrity is just part of what we offer our authors and journal clients who opt into our full figure review service:

1. Image integrity and accessibility––do images show signs of inappropriate manipulation? Can readers with impaired color vision understand the presented data?
2. Data presentation––does the graph type suit the data? Are appropriate controls shown?
3. Figure aesthetics––are font and color schemes consistent?

These are all aspects that the editors in chief and editorial board members of our journal clients have told us are important for high-quality publications––in fact, one of our journal clients brought us on just to try to keep manuscripts off PubPeer. Having us check your manuscript for inappropriate image use before you submit it to scrutiny by reviewers and journal editors is super easy––just fill out our contact form.