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In January of 2023, Morressier created a new product team solely focused on managing the detection of research misconduct in scientific publishing. This Team was called Research Integrity.
A platform that focuses on providing publishing tools for Scholarly Publishers and Societies, with submission management workflows and AI-powered research integrity solutions.
A specialized AI system focused on protecting research owned by Publishers and Research Institutes. It provides users with preflight and integrity checks that suggest integrity measures to take, all in a single dashboard for ease of use.
The practice of conducting research in ways that promote trust and confidence in all aspects of science. This includes overseeing the whole research lifecycle, from hypothesis to experiment, through to publication and the formation of the scientific record.
As the volume of scientific research grows exponentially, publishers and research societies struggle to effectively detect and prevent fraud, plagiarism, and misconduct in submissions. This challenge, combined with overburdened peer reviewers and outdated manual verification processes, puts the integrity and trustworthiness of published research at risk.
1 year, 3 months: Continuous improvement and UX upgrades January 2023 to March 2024
B2B team with 2 Fullstack Engineers, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Manager and a User Researcher (with company wide obligations). I took on the role of Senior Product Designer and UX Researcher.
Picture this: A team of doctors changes their treatment protocol based on a recently published study, only to discover months later that the study contained fabricated data. Or consider a government allocating millions in funding based on research that turned out to be plagiarized. These aren't hypothetical scenarios - they're real consequences of compromised research integrity.
For publishers, the stakes are equally high. A single retracted paper can damage a journal's reputation built over decades. The financial impact of retractions is significant, from the direct costs of processing to the broader impact on subscription and licensing revenue. But the real cost lies in lost trust. When Scientific American for instance reports another research scandal, it doesn't just hurt one journal - it erodes public confidence in scientific publishing as a whole.
We discovered that publishers face a challenging balancing act. They need to publish groundbreaking research quickly to stay competitive, while also ensuring rigorous verification. Traditional manual checks are becoming unsustainable as submission volumes grow exponentially. Meanwhile, new forms of misconduct emerge almost as quickly as the tools to detect them.
This is why we built Integrity Manager - not just as a checking tool, but as a trust-building platform. For publishers, it means protecting their reputation and reducing costly retractions. For the broader scientific community, it means more reliable research that can be confidently used to advance human knowledge and solve real-world problems.
The research world is facing a crisis of trust. When only 29% of U.S. adults have confidence in medical scientists to act in the public's best interest, and headlines of scientific fraud continue to go viral, there's clearly a problem that needs solving.
Morressier's journey into tackling this challenge began unexpectedly while digitizing conference posters and presentations. As CEO Sami Benchekroun discovered, pulling at one thread revealed a tangled web of issues: content management workflows lacked rigorous reviews, the peer review system was overwhelmed (spending a staggering 15,000 years globally on reviews in 2020), and the "publish or perish" culture was creating dangerous pressures. With data fabrication accounting for 38% of research misconduct and a growing scarcity of willing peer reviewers, it became clear that the legacy publishing infrastructure wasn't equipped to handle these challenges.
Morressier realized that protecting research integrity required more than just point solutions – it needed a comprehensive, technology-driven approach that could support and verify research at every stage of its lifecycle. Read Morressier’s Guide to Research Integrity here
The research publishing industry faces four critical challenges that threaten the quality and trustworthiness of scientific literature:
Manual and fragmented screening processes across submission and peer review make early fraud detection difficult. Basic issues like plagiarism, fake credentials, and manipulated data slip through without automated tools.
Overwhelmed peer reviewers struggle with spotting sophisticated misconduct while managing increasing submission volumes. The heavy reliance on human intervention makes the process slow and prone to missing subtle signs of fraud.
Complex networks of self-citations and citation rings often go undetected, leading to artificially inflated impact metrics. This creates a cycle of questionable research validity across publications.
Late-stage retractions damage publisher credibility and public trust in science. When fraudulent research influences other work or policy decisions, the impact becomes far-reaching.
Publishers currently juggle multiple platforms to catch different types of research misconduct. Each solution specializes in specific issues - Paperpal handles preflight checks, ImageTwin focuses on image manipulation, and iThenticate deals with plagiarism detection. This fragmented approach creates new problems instead of solving them.
There's a clear need for a unified platform that brings together different types of integrity checks in one place, making it easier and faster for publishers to detect and investigate potential misconduct without jumping between multiple tools.
Developing an independent service that can be used by our Events/Proceedings platform and Journal Submission platform to prevent fraud, plagiarism and other kinds of misconduct while ensuring the highest possible integrity for every submission that runs through our services.
After analyzing the industry landscape and market needs, we opted for an incremental development approach. The strategy was to start lean with a focused set of integrity checks, allowing us to validate our solution through real customer feedback. This measured approach helped us build anticipation in the market while giving us room to refine the experience and expand our offerings based on actual user needs. We also decided to start with partnering/integrating some of the existing check providers into our platform as an aggregator. Through a series of workshops, we identified the core HMWs (How Might We) we needed to keep in mind, creating a foundation for future development:
We adopted a strategic, step-by-step release plan to build and validate our solution carefully. Beginning with an MVP to test core features, we moved to a Beta phase for user feedback and refinement. The Integrations stage connected our platform with existing Morressier tools, before finally launching as a full standalone solution. This incremental approach allowed us to learn and adapt at each stage, ensuring we built exactly what publishers needed while maintaining momentum in development.
We primarily focused on a small and lightweight interface with as minimal interactions as possible. We discovered that misconducts were classified in different ways such as Preflight (includes, formatting, language, disclosure statements etc) and Ethical (includes, plagiarism, author verification, existing misconduct history by authors, institutions or countries etc). Further discourse showed that while these checks may be important generally, there are certain use cases that the segmentation fit more into and this help us better understand our target customers
There were 2 use cases we decided to focus on:
Our first use case caters to researchers and authors who need quick validation of their work. The journey starts at a clean, simple upload interface where users drop their document and enter their email. Once submitted, our integration with PaperPal runs preflight checks covering basic formatting, language, and quality standards. Users receive an email containing a direct link to their comprehensive report once the analysis is complete.
Our second use case serves organizations needing to verify multiple submissions simultaneously. Using the same straightforward interface, publishers can bulk upload their documents. The system processes each submission through more rigorous checks, including plagiarism detection via iThenticate integration. Upon completion, the system generates a structured Google Sheet containing:
Publishers receive an email notification with a "View Report" CTA, leading them to their custom Google Sheet where they can efficiently review and manage all their submissions in one place.
Both experiences are built on a minimal, focused MVP interface that collects only essential information - the documents and an email address - making it accessible and user-friendly while delivering powerful verification capabilities.
The MVP phase revealed crucial insights about our market. While individual researchers found value in our tool, the cost structure wasn't sustainable for them - many couldn't justify the expense for occasional use. Meanwhile, publishers and societies showed strong interest and had more complex needs, willing to invest in protecting their publication quality. This clear market signal led us to pivot our focus to creating a specialized platform for these institutional users, who needed robust tools to manage and investigate research at scale.
In our BETA version, we transformed the platform to better handle batch uploads and management. Users could now monitor and manage their uploaded batches in one centralized dashboard, eliminating the need for external Google Sheets. The platform provided clear visibility into processing status, showing how many papers passed or failed in each batch. We simplified reference tracking by replacing submission IDs with custom batch names, making it easier for users to track and manage their uploads.
We introduced a robust account management system for our internal team to manage publisher and society spaces. Through customer conversations, we discovered two critical configuration needs: First, publishers wanted to pay only for the specific checks they need, requiring a system to enable or disable different types of checks per workspace. Second, they needed configurable thresholds for their chosen checks. For instance, while a 20% plagiarism score might trigger a flag for one publisher, it might be acceptable for another. This led to creating a management portal where our customer success team could easily control both check availability and threshold settings per publisher, ensuring they only pay for and see the checks that matter to their workflow.
Enhancements from MVP:
Morressier offers a range of content management products, including our flagship Proceedings Manager: a lightweight web app that streamlines conference research publication. This tool automatically extracts information from volumes of Research Papers, preparing the information for Conference Organizers to verify integrity issues and efficiently transmit volumes to Publishers. This includes prepping the information for Conference Organizers (main users) to verify integrity issues and send volumes to Publishers, so that they can publish these with efficiency. The platform handles every stage of preparing a research piece for publishing from creating Call for Papers (Conference Organisers), Submitting research (Authors), Peer Reviews (Reviewers), Forwarding to Publisher (conference organiser) and final publishing (publishing society).
With the Research Integrity platform now stable, we integrated it into Proceedings Manager to enhance the publication workflow. This integration meant Conference Organizers could now:
This integration marked a significant step in our development journey, allowing existing customers to access advanced integrity checks within a workflow they already knew and trusted, rather than treating it as a separate process. It also unlocked key upselling opportunities for us.
You can read more about this integration and the work within the Proceedings Manager as regards to Research Integrity here
After about a year of close collaboration with publishers and analyzing platform usage, we uncovered fascinating complexities in how scientific publishing really works. What started as a simple integrity checking tool needed to evolve into something far more sophisticated.
Think about how scientific knowledge is organized: Publishers are like knowledge guardians, overseeing multiple journals, each telling its own scientific story through volumes of research. Take IOP Publishing's Astronomical Journal, for example. Since 1998, they've been documenting humanity's understanding of the cosmos through at least two volumes every year. That's over 52 volumes, each containing anywhere from 10 to 100+ research papers - a vast universe of scientific discoveries that needs careful organization and verification.
Publisher → Journals → Volumes → Research Papers. This organization allows publishers to manage and monitor integrity checks at every level of their publication structure.
This realization led us to reimagine our workspace structure. We built a system that mirrors this natural hierarchy:
But organizing wasn't enough - we needed to help publishers uncover the stories hidden in their integrity checks. We created a new analytics system that worked like a telescope, helping publishers zoom in and out of their publication landscape:
These additions transformed our platform from a simple checking tool into a comprehensive research integrity command center, giving publishers unprecedented visibility and control over their publication quality.
The evolution of Integrity Manager reshaped how publishers protect research quality. Through careful design and iteration, we created tools that help users effectively detect and understand potential misconduct. What began as a collection of separate integrity checks has become a unified system for safeguarding scientific literature, proving that effective detection requires both technical excellence and deep domain understanding.
Morressier raised $16.5m in Series B funding due to the impact and prospects of the Research Integrity product in the industry late 2023.
3 existing submission management customers choosing to explore a package that integrated Research Integrity in their existing Morressier Workflows.
From the launch of the team in January 2023, the team has generated a sales pipeline worth about $4m in possible income.
Research investigation and conclusion duration reduced from 3 days to 16 hours due to early misconduct detection.
Building Integrity Manager transformed our understanding of research verification. What began as a simple checking tool evolved into a trust platform that adapts to each publisher's unique needs and workflows. We learned that effective integrity checking isn't just about finding problems - it's about fitting seamlessly into how science is published
Key Takeaways:
This project has not only resulted in a successful product but has also deepened our expertise in research integrity workflows and strengthened our position as innovators in the scientific publishing ecosystem.
Building on the successful market validation, we are focusing on expanding our automated integrity checks and AI detection capabilities while making the system more action-oriented with clear, guided next steps for users when issues are detected. By enhancing actionability and deepening integration options with publisher workflows, we can empower users to resolve integrity issues faster and more confidently.
©Lanre Fadire 2023
