Clear Skies!
Clear Skies created the first index of research integrity: Oversight.
We offer metrics describing research standards covering the entire research ecosystem. If you want to know more about metrics for your portfolio, get in touch.
I sometimes get asked why I picked the name ‘Clear Skies’.
I used to fly gliders. Gliders don’t have engines, so technically, they don’t actually “fly”, they just kind of fall out of the air.
For a pilot, the key skill is to wiggle the controls about in such a way as to survive impact. But, if you work hard at it, and maybe the winds blow in your favour, something really weird happens. You can actually learn to make the glider fall up. It’s absolutely terrifying and incredibly good fun. Try it if you get the chance!
In a glider, Clear Skies means you can go anywhere. I think the name has good vibes and I hope other people feel that, too.
A few months ago, an astronomer told me that “Clear Skies!” is like a greeting among astronomers. It means that the weather is good for telescopes. So he wanted to know if the name “Clear Skies” means “the right environment for science”. I wish I’d thought of that.
There was actually a long list of potential names all with different pros and cons. “Clear Skies” also sounds like a mix of my wife’s name and my daughter’s name. I think about that a lot.
It’s funny to see the way words change their meanings. ‘Research integrity’ wasn’t a phrase that you heard so much back when I was doing the ground work for Clear Skies in 2021. It also tended to mean a lot of things like “has the research been done properly”, or “are there any spelling mistakes”, that sort of thing. But over time, it came to more closely mean “honesty in research”. They say integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. I like that definition — integrity is doing the right thing. It’s not quite the same as doing things right. We can use a different word for that.
The vision for Clear Skies wasn’t about detecting research fraud and it wasn’t about research integrity either. It was, and still is, about research standards. And by ‘standards’ I do mean doing things right. It’s important to understand that the only reason we see bizarre aberrations in the literature (like papermills) is because we don’t have good feedback on standards. If someone makes a mistake in the lab or the publishing house, they need to know.
Clear Skies models the standards of papers, journals, institutions, funders (or potentially any other body of research). The important thing here is that we aren’t just looking for where the good science is. We’re looking for where the bad science isn’t.
I’ve been talking about metrics for standards for a very long time. People weren’t receptive to the idea at first, but perceptions have shifted a lot and the value is absolutely clear now. The initial vision of Clear Skies was to build the world’s first index of research integrity: Oversight. The details of that vision did change over time, mostly as we learned from working with our customers, but it was interesting to see how what people wanted converged with what we were building.
Oversight is an award-winning service offering metrics describing research standards at every level. Papers, journals, publishers, institutions, funders or any other body of research.
We are adding new features week-to-week and metrics are a key part of that. (If you aren’t already signed up, get in touch!)
Why are standards so important?
There are 2 reasons…
Standards in Open Access: a necessity
Open Science is here to stay. By 2021, we were firmly on course to a 100% OA world. Even in 2025, we are not there yet, and there have been a lot of bumps in the road, but the future is open, one way or another.
In a subscriptions world, we needed metrics that showed us usage. That might be citations, downloads, or the many alternative metrics out there. But the OA world is much more about author service than it is about reader service. We also live in a world where usage is incredibly easy to game. So, if we want to show that a journal offers a good service to authors, we don’t need to show that the journal publishes good papers, or well-used papers. We need to be able to show that the journal doesn’t publish bad papers. If we know that, then when we see that journal in an author’s CV, we know that the paper isn’t a bad paper and that the author passed some sort of quality check. Otherwise the line on the author’s CV is meaningless.
So, in an OA world, demonstrating quality control is the key to sustainability. And in a world where usage is easily gamed, it’s important for subscription journals, too. Mandates, business models, transformative deals are all important, but the bedrock for making anything work is quality control. Without it, there is no trust in the process or its outputs.
Research misconduct
The other reason is research fraud. Even in 2021 it had become far too pervasive. The scale was much worse than most people understood.
Research fraud is a strange thing. The harm is very obvious, but very hard to demonstrate. One of the most highly cited Alzheimer’s research papers was retracted due to image manipulation. That’s probably one of the best examples where the harm is very clear — apparently, enormous amounts of funding and time were burned pursuing treatments that had no hope of ever working. Resources could have been put to better use. But, other than that, it’s clear at this stage that we have a large number of people who have been handed jobs based on fabricated CVs and a swathe of unidentified flaws in the literature with unpredictable effects. Real scientists use those papers and real science suffers as a result.
There are 2 things that Clear Skies already achieves at scale by focusing on standards:
- Making proliferation hard. We’ve talked before about the sheer scale of research fraud. Even when you see the size of it, you’re still only looking at the tip of the iceberg. It’s always looking for a home, but we screen 100% of the literature, so when it finds one, we know and so do you.
- Making investigations cheap. The time-cost inherent in investigations is significant. With Clear Skies, you can avoid them altogether.
Standards mean that those problems are greatly reduced. Real or fake, you can’t ever stop someone from putting a PDF on the web. But you can make it hard for someone to put your name on it and you can evidence that, too.
The best vision for managing research fraud in the future is mitigation. It will never be possible to completely eradicate dishonesty. But it will be possible to shrink it to a manageable, and relatively harmless size and keep it there. At that point, good science is easy: just be where the bad science isn’t. Clear Skies will show you that.
