Last week I chaired a panel on identity at the STM conference on research integrity. I had the amazing Laurel Haak, Tom Demeranville, and Jennifer Wright on the panel. We ran a menti during our session,

You can see the results here with csv's of the data https://mulvany.net/stm_integrity_day_2025/, and I've pasted screenshots of the results below.
 
Some observations from the day and from the panel.

- Most of the discussion on panels were about individual cases. The audience voted that bad humans are their biggest problem, and fake identities was identified as being a large problem, but not the largest problem.

- In contrast the sleuths panel talked about scale problems. Those problems are increasingly been driven by automated processes, and by lack of identity standards, so while we can empathise easily with individual cases, I think the scaling problem is bigger.

- It was good to hear that funders are unafraid to take action against bad actors. BUT they see an almost trivially tiny number of integrity issues per year. Most issues are being driven by scaling problems and from or by sectors of the science community who would not be present at an event like this day. So there is probably at least at two tier system of science in operation today. I think this is a problem.

- It was bad to hear that there is an increase in harassment.

- I like the work of the sleuths. I don't think they have an appreciation for the legal constraints that publishers operate under. It was mentioned a few times that publishers could just choose to act unilaterally. Why not funders, why not institutions, why not individuals in departments? It's tricky.

- Surprise - I was surprised in our results below that few folk thought funders held accountability. Might have been the way the question was framed.

- Accountability was not addressed much during the day.

- There is a lot of good work going on.

- There is an underling lack of trust between some of the groups present in the room, but I think we are all working on the same side of trying to build out a defensible and accurate picture of reality, and not all actors in the world are aligned with that view.