Anyone can do post-publication peer review.

Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.

Anyone can do forensic metascience.

Anyone can sleuth.

However, investigating the integrity of the published scientific literature often requires domain-specific knowledge that not everyone will have. This open source project is a collection of guides written and maintained by publication integrity experts to distribute this domain-specific knowledge so that others can participate in post-publication peer review.

COSIG currently hosts 32 guides and was last updated on 24 November 2025. Guides can be downloaded as individual PDFs. A combined PDF with all guides included can be downloaded here.

Suggestions to improve COSIG can be submitted by opening an issue on COSIG's GitHub repo or by emailing admin@cosig.net. Before contributing, read COSIG's Contributing and Code of Conduct pages.

Table of Contents

Basics

• Getting started with post-publication peer review
• PubPeer commenting best practices
• Reporting publication integrity issues to publishers
• Common dismissive responses to integrity concerns

General guides

• Extracting vector graphics from a PDF
• Extract tabular data from an article
• The vertical line test
• Image duplication
• Image compression artifacts
• Software for image forensics
• Citations
• Citations to retracted publications
• Data forensics using Microsoft Excel
• Formulaic research
• Plagiarism of text
• Suspicious venues
• Ethical approval of human subjects research

Biology and medicine

• Antibody validation
• Misidentified and non-verifiable cell lines
• Nucleotide sequence reagents
• Tumor burden

Materials sciences and engineering

• X-ray diffraction patterns - Scherrer's equation
• X-ray diffraction patterns - data duplication
• Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy
• Elemental composition
• Tauc plots

Mathematics, statistics and computer science

• Evaluating the performance of binary classifiers
• Evaluating the performance of multiclass classifiers
• Granularity-related inconsistency of means (GRIM)
• Standard deviation versus standard error
• Multiple hypothesis correction
• Data leakage

License and citation

Except where otherwise indicated, all material in COSIG is available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. That means that you are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as COSIG is properly cited. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

Citing COSIG itself

APA style citation

(2025, June 4). Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ

MLA style citation

“Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.” OSF, 4 June 2025. Web. 

Chicago style citation

2025. “Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.” OSF. June 5. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ. 

BibTeX entry

@misc{cosig,
  title={Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides},
  url={https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ},
  publisher={OSF},
  year={2025},
  month={June}
}

Citing a commentary explaining the motivation behind COSIG

APA style citation

Richardson, R. (2025). The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding participation in post-publication peer review. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777

MLA style citation

Richardson, R. The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding Participation in Post-publication Peer Review. Zenodo, 4 June 2025, doi:10.5281/zenodo.15564777.

Chicago style citation

Richardson, Reese. “The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding Participation in Post-publication Peer Review”. Zenodo, June 4, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777.

BibTex entry

@article{cosig_commentary,
  author={Richardson, Reese},
  title={The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding participation in post-publication peer review},
  month={June},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Zenodo},
  doi={10.5281/zenodo.15564777},
  url={https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777}
}

Contributors

The following individuals have contributed to COSIG in some way:

• Anna Abalkina (ORCiD)
• René Aquarius (ORCiD)
• Lonni Besançon (ORCiD)
• Elisabeth Bik (ORCiD)
• David Bimler (ORCiD)
• Jennifer Byrne (ORCiD)
• Guillaume Cabanac (ORCiD)
• Jana Christopher (ORCiD)
• M.V. Dougherty (ORCiD)
• Ian Hussey (ORCiD)
• Charles Khouri (ORCiD)
• Yagmur Ozturk (ORCiD) (Maintainer)
• Kevin Patrick (ORCiD)
• Solal Pirelli (ORCiD) (Maintainer)
• Reese Richardson (ORCiD) (Maintainer)
• Nicholas Ritchie (ORCiD)
• Matt Spick (ORCiD)
• Stefan Stender (ORCiD)
• Corrado Viotti (ORCiD)
• Nerita vitiensis (pseudonymous)