Founder Insights Part Two: Research Integrity, Trust and how GetFTR Strengthens the Scholarly Record

As part of GetFTR’s fifth-anniversary celebrations, we sat down with the founding publishers to reflect on five years of progress and change across the research discovery landscape.

An earlier interview in Research Information captured some of their key reflections, but the conversation uncovered many more valuable insights.

As GetFTR’s fifth-anniversary year draws to a close, we wanted to share these additional perspectives in a four-part blog series. Each post explores a key theme shaping the future of research discovery: how GetFTR and its partners are supporting trusted discovery and access, strengthening research integrity, and ensuring that visibility and value travel with the version of record wherever discovery happens.

Maintaining trust in a distributed discovery ecosystem

In the first part of this series, we explored how publishers can safeguard the visibility and usage of their content as discovery becomes increasingly fragmented.

But visibility alone is not enough. As researchers navigate preprints, AI summaries, aggregated platforms, and third-party citations, trust and transparency are key measures of value. Researchers rely on publishers to ensure that what they find, read, and cite represents the most authoritative and current version of record. That assurance underpins confidence not only in individual studies but in the scholarly ecosystem itself.

The evolving challenge of research integrity

Research integrity depends on transparency and the ability to verify sources, track updates, and identify retractions or corrections. This process has always been complex, but as content circulates beyond publisher platforms into search engines, repositories, and AI tools, those signals of integrity can easily be lost or obscured.

This creates a core challenge: how can the reliability and status of an article follow it wherever it appears?

GetFTR’s role: extending integrity beyond the publisher site

GetFTR addresses this challenge by embedding signals of transparency and integrity such as retractions, errata, updates, and licence information directly into the researcher’s discovery experience. It uses information from Crossref and Retraction Watch, relying on publishers to keep this data accurate and current.

Through its cross-publisher API entitlement checking service and integration with major discovery tools, GetFTR ensures that users connect to the trusted version of record and are alerted to retractions and updates at the point of discovery.

“Researchers come across published works in many ways, and not always by accessing the original article. Noting an article’s updated status wherever it’s cited greatly increases the visibility of corrections.” Ralph Youngen, ACS

By extending these trust indicators across the discovery ecosystem, GetFTR helps publishers uphold the scholarly record in practice, not just in principle.

Why this matters in the age of AI

We know that Generative AI tools are rapidly reshaping how researchers and the public encounter academic content. These systems summarise and interpret research, often without clear attribution or version control. Without reliable provenance signals, AI risks spreading outdated or incorrect material.

“With Generative AI tools repackaging research content, sometimes inaccurately, providing researchers an easy, reliable pathway to the version of record is more important than ever.” Todd Toler, Wiley

By embedding authoritative links at the point of discovery, GetFTR ensures researchers reach the correct, citable version of record, regardless of which tool they use.

Transparency underpins trust

Integrity in research is not only about preventing mistakes, it’s about enabling clarity and accountability across the ecosystem. Publishers, librarians, and discovery services all share that responsibility.

“Publishers are the guardians of trust in science. Publishers play an important role in maintaining trust in scientific information. GetFTR supports this by providing trusted pathways to the final, authoritative version of an article including updates about its status” Rose L’Huiller, Elsevier

Through shared infrastructure, GetFTR ensures corrections, retractions, and licence updates are surfaced wherever discovery happens, not hidden on publisher sites.

Collective responsibility, shared infrastructure

Research integrity cannot be safeguarded by any one organisation, it depends on collaboration across stakeholder gropus and on interoperable infrastructure that makes trust signals visible across platforms, tools, and workflows. By aligning publishers, libraries, and discovery partners around a common goal, GetFTR helps preserve not only the accuracy of individual articles but the credibility of the research ecosystem as a whole.

Looking ahead

As research discovery continues to diversify, the industry’s need to focus on trust, provenance, and transparency will only grow. GetFTR’s role is to ensure that integrity travels with the article, so every researcher, wherever they start, can trace their findings back to the authoritative, publisher-verified version of record.

Visibility and access matter, but without trust, confidence in research communication cannot endure. Visibility and access alone are not enough – trust is the backbone of credible research, and GetFTR ensures that backbone holds firm for the future of science.

Next in the series: Collaboration and Innovation: How Publishers Prove Shared Infrastructure Works