Conference and journals have a unique opportunity to influence research ethics, as researchers’ careers depend on their ability to understand and meet the requirements for having their research accepted for publication. In the past few years, a number of Computer Science conferences have added research ethics policies to their calls for papers. Good reasons for creating such a policy may include the desire to educate authors unaware of institutional review requirements or of resources that may help them perform research more ethically, ensure compliance with institutional review requirements by requiring authors to attest to knowing and following these requirements, encourage authors to document their ethical choices and outcomes to inform reviewers and those designing or evaluating future studies, and specify how ethics factors into the review process when reviewers have concerns about the ethics of a submission....

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. Louis D. Brandeis, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice from 1916 to 1939, in “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It” (1914), Chapter 5 Two years ago I started a personal experiment in transparency; I began attaching my name to every peer review I wrote for scientific journals and conferences....