Under repair: a publication ethics and research record in the making

Based on fieldwork in the Committee on Publication Ethics, this paper offers an analysis of the forms of doings that publication ethics in action can take during what is called the ‘Forum’, a space where allegations of dubious research conduct get aired and debated between editors and publishers. This article examines recurring motifs within the review of publication practices whose ethics are called into. These motifs include: the shaping of publication ethics as an expertise that can be standardized across locations and disciplines, the separation of the research record from relations that produce it, and the divisibility of the scientific paper. Together these institute an ethics of repair at the centre of the curative enterprise of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Under the language of correcting the literature the members are working out, along with authors, what the research record should be and, inevitably, what it is. In turn, this article elicits new analytical objects that re-describe publication ethics as a form of expertise, beyond (and despite) the rehearsed axioms of this now well-established professional field.