How often does that happen in practice at your institution?

In a world where reputation matters, strong governance could become a signal of institutional trustworthiness.

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Universities routinely benchmark their performance.

Perhaps the next question is whether they should also benchmark their governance.

Imagine institutions being able to say:

⚫️ Our governance has been independently benchmarked against leading universities
⚫️ Our integrity processes meet defined international standards
⚫️ Our oversight of AI-assisted research has been externally reviewed

In many other sectors, organisations actively highlight the strength of their governance.

⚫️ They publish audit frameworks
⚫️ They describe risk management systems
⚫️ They demonstrate how oversight works

Universities rarely do this in a systematic way.

But perhaps they should.

Yet they shape something just as important: the trust that students and staff place in the institution.

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⚫️ How transparent are our policies on authorship, conflicts of interest and research evaluation?
⚫️ How effective are our internal systems for checking the reliability of research data and metrics?

These issues rarely appear in rankings.

For example:

⚫️ How robust are our research integrity processes compared with similar institutions?
⚫️ How strong are our procedures for verifying academic CVs and publication claims?
⚫️ How do we govern the use of artificial intelligence in research and teaching?

Senior leaders can usually say very clearly where their institution sits relative to its peers.

But there is another question that is discussed far less often.

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How often do universities benchmark their governance practices?

Universities compare themselves constantly against competitors on measures such as:

⚫️ Global ranking positions
⚫️ Research income
⚫️ Citation impact
⚫️ Student satisfaction
⚫️ Graduate employability

League tables, dashboards and benchmarking reports are now part of everyday strategic management.

Most universities know exactly how they compare in rankings.
But far fewer, if any, know how their governance compares with other universities.

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Benchmarking has become routine in higher education.
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Hallucinated References: Five Excuses for Academic Misconduct When I proposed rejecting papers with hallucinated references, the support was overwhelming. But the critical voices revealed five argument patterns: from AI hype through TINA rhetoric to nihilism.

Hallucinated References: Five Excuses for Academic Misconduct

Or should they avoid doing so to prevent perceived conflicts of interest?

Practices seem to vary quite widely between disciplines and publishers.

How is this handled in your discipline?

Different journals, disciplines and publishers manage this balance in different ways.

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An open question

So here is the follow-up question.

Should editorial board members publish in the journals they serve?

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A governance tension

This creates an interesting paradox.

⚫️ Editors who never publish in the journal may appear detached from it.
⚫️ Editors who publish frequently in the journal may raise questions about independence.

⚫️ Whether preferential treatment might occur
⚫️ Whether reviewers feel pressure when an editor is the author
⚫️ Whether the process appears fully independent to readers

None of these concerns necessarily imply wrongdoing.

But scholarly publishing relies heavily on trust and perceived fairness.

Some observers feel uncomfortable with the optics of editors publishing in their own journals.

Questions that sometimes arise include:

With these safeguards, the process can function quite appropriately.

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The perception question

However, even when these safeguards exist, the situation can still raise concerns.

Most reputable journals have procedures designed to protect the integrity of the process.

For example:

⚫️ Assigning an independent handling editor
⚫️ Excluding the submitting editor from the decision process
⚫️ Ensuring the manuscript undergoes standard peer review

⚫️ Engagement with the journal’s scholarly community
⚫️ Confidence in the journal as an outlet
⚫️ Participation in the intellectual conversation the journal hosts

In many disciplines, editors publishing in their own journals is completely normal.

It is therefore not surprising if their work sometimes (often) fits within the journal’s scope.

Publishing in the journal can signal several things:

This post considers the opposite question. Should editorial board members publish in journals on which they are serving?

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Editors as members of the community

Editorial board members are usually active researchers in the same field as the journal.

Should editorial board members publish in the journals they help run?

A few days ago I asked whether editorial board members should have published in the journal they serve?
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How are institutions approaching this?

AI detection tools are already being matched by tools designed to bypass them.

The real question for universities may not be whether AI is being used.

It may be whether institutional governance frameworks are evolving quickly enough to deal with how these tools are actually used in practice.

3️⃣ If it were confirmed that a staff member had used a service like this, what action would be appropriate?

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2️⃣ What would a university do if it suspected that a member of staff was using such services?

Three practical questions

For universities, this raises some interesting governance questions.

1️⃣ Do institutional policies explicitly address the use of services designed to evade AI detection?

Tools designed to optimise text so that it passes AI detection systems sit in a grey area between assistance and concealment.

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But these policies are often written in fairly general terms. They typically focus on responsible use, disclosure and author accountability.

Do they really capture situations like this? Even if they do, are universities ensuring compliance?

The goal is to ensure that automated detection systems do not flag the content.

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A governance gap?

Many universities now have AI policies.